Thinking Machines: Constructing Knowledge in the Victorian Periodical Press, 1840-1860

What are the historical conditions of knowledge? How do the structures we use to write and share knowledge shape the way we think? In the period 1830-1860, the rapid growth of the periodical press created new kinds of texts, readerships, and ways of reading, and was a driving force in the period's wide-reaching social, economic, and political changes. How did this newly mechanised print culture construct and organise the knowledge it presented? The meanings and values ascribed to developments such as, for example, the steam piston or the reformed postal system, were not innate or inevitable but resulted from discursive practices rooted in the periodical press. Understanding textual practices therefore deepens our understanding of key drivers of social change. The primary objective of this project is to investigate how, why, and to what effect, knowledge was constructed by the newly developed print culture of the nineteenth century.

Drawing on recent theory and utilising a scale of study that was impossible until the recent digitisation of archives, the project will consider both physical and conceptual forms, to uncover how knowledge was constructed at localised, discursive, and systemic levels. Indeed, the question of scale has become central to the field of periodicals scholarship as digitisation has allowed researchers to track keywords and concepts across large datasets. This has resulted in new methods such as "distant reading" (as opposed to traditional "close reading"), and the field of digital humanities is a thriving research area.

The proposed project aims to use the discursive method I successfully employed in my earlier monograph project, Discourses of Vision in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Palgrave, 2018), but with a new attention to the issue of scope. By beginning the analysis with a close-up view of individual texts and magazine/newspaper issues, and then gradually widening to consider publication runs, inter-publication relations, and eventually publication systems, markets, readerships, and commercial interests, the project will utilise an innovative combination of both close and distant reading techniques, to offer a broad view grounded in the particulars of historical detail. Such an approach speaks to the second of the two objectives, which is to refine existing methods or develop new ones to more fully leverage the advantages of digital scholarship while retaining the benefits of traditional historiography. With its innovative use of archival research to answer key questions about knowledge construction alongside its ambitious conceptual scope, the project will make a substantial contribution to Victorian periodical studies and will be of wider value to scholars across the humanities who are involved in historical or textual scholarship.