Viral Texts: Mapping Networks of Reprinting in 19th-Century Newspapers and Magazines (2017) is a digital project by Northeastern University’s NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks. In concept, it seeks to capture news, prose, poems, anecdotes, and other texts widely shared between different newspapers in the 19th century and map the path by which they were shared.

The project is quite comprehensive and detailed, including a collection of most widely-shared poems, a number of network graphs allowing users to see which newspapers shared items with which other newspapers, and a list of publications resulting from the work. The centerpiece and most interesting aspect of the work by far is the interactive exhibit “a Love Letter to Viral Texts,” where the authors have taken an oft-reprinted humorous love letter—in this instance lifted from the November 4th, 1868 front page of The Raftsman’s Journal, a newspaper from Clearfield, Pennsylvania—and linked various terms, quotations, and concepts from the text to bits and pieces of other newsprint, either viral texts themselves or simply contextual knowledge drawn from the Journal or other newspapers of the time. For example, a link from the phrase “a sea of glory” leads to notes on uses of that same phrase in a Shakespeare parody and an 1819 hymn repurposed as an anti-slavery anthem. “Under a glass tumbler” gives you an 1834 tarriff on the import of German glassware, a satirical report on the theft of a ridiculous list of items (including said tumbler), and a travelogue mentioning what now seems a whimsical idea: capturing fireflies in Jamaica underneath a glass tumbler and reading by their light. Each of these connected texts comes from some other newspaper, some also from Pennsylvania but some from as far afield as Vermont, Illinois, or Washington. 

Viral Texts serves as a kind of expanded historical bibliography, attempting to give a modern reader a picture not only of what a pre-Civil War Pennsylvanian might be reading in the newspaper, but also the context in which they might be reading it. By emphasizing the “virality” and spread of these texts, and providing them side by side with similar texts that mention the same content, the project makes the implicit argument that a reader in Clearfield in 1868 might have the same comparative context that the site offers the user in 2020. With texts shared between geographically disparate newspapers, it’s likely that readers in Ohio might read an almost identical copy of the love letter in question, and, having already come across the “sea of glory” in their Anti-Slavery Bugle, enter into a new understanding of the use of the phrase as it sits here in the midst of satire. If that same understanding is not quite conveyed to the reader of the site in 2020 (clearly there are other contextual and cultural knowledges not shared between the two readers other than what they have read in newspapers), it is at least a step closer to commonality than if the front page of the Journal had been carefully unfolded, alone, in a Pennsylvania archive.

However, despite the clear value of work like this to historical bibliography, the site itself has clear issues with reproducibility and preservation, as with a lot of interactive digital archives—ironically, as they often attempt to their content more transparent and accessible to a larger audience and, presumably, for a longer time than their physical counterparts. The “data” link in the About page is broken, as are several links in the interactive exhibit, making it difficult to go deeper than a surface level into the academic work being done here, verify that the information presented is accurate, or build upon the work here for related projects.

Considering the About page describes two phases of work, from 2014-2015 and from 2015-2016 (and the suggested citation lists the publication date of the project as 2017), it’s likely that the NEH and ACLS grants by which they are funded simply no longer provide support for a team to continue to maintain the website, or increase accessibility for larger audiences. This is a larger problem than just this project; the structure of grant funding for digital archives and the transitory nature of academics often leaves this work stranded, half-complete, or slowly deteriorating as links break and resources are lost.

On a less practical (and less depressing) note, the comparison to “viral” images and texts as the word is used now, while compelling, obscures (at least) one major disconnect between widely-shared content then and now that I think is worth mentioning: who, in fact, is sharing the texts. The editorial hand behind these newspapers is most clearly seen on the site in the list of “Fugitive Verses,” or viral poems, many of which were sent in anonymously (or from anonymous authors, or both) and contain editorial notes acknowledging such. But editors are the entire engine behind the virality of these texts. As the project explains, newspaper editors would subscribe to editions from other cities and even states, and crib content from their colleagues and competitors. Poems, jokes, and interesting factoids provided useful buffer to fill odd spaces in page layouts, which contributed to their “virality,” and it doesn’t seem a stretch to assume that some off these small odds and ends of text were shared more widely than others due to the particular tastes of specific editors. In modern parlance, whether or not it should be, “virality” is often equated to pure popularity, because the machine behind the spread of memes, tweets, and videos is individuals—a certain subset of individuals, to be sure (those on twitter, those with internet access, those with a certain sense of humor) but certainly a larger and less homogenous subset of individuals than “newspaper editors in 19th century America.”

I raise this last not as a criticism of this archive, necessarily, but as something to consider in evaluating the larger project of creating digital archives out of physical ones: there is curation that happens in the creation of a digital project, but first there is curation that happens in a Clearfield, Pennsylvania newsroom in late October of 1868, and part of the work of the second must be to acknowledge and understand the workings of the first.