"Digital Dickens"
Online archives, part of the Digital Humanities push, hold limitless potential. In presenting information online, offering access to the general public, such projects in any field break down the boundaries between the professional academic able to consult the finest libraries in the world and the independent scholar, graduate student, or online reader. Though many Victorian online archives and resources are already featured on our resource page, and in previous blog posts, I recently discovered a few more during a recent talk at NeMLA (The Dickens Society's "Digital Dickens" panel) that may be of interest to Dickensians researching Victorian textual and historical studies. See the following entries for Dickens digital projects both old and young!
Digital Dickens Ventures:
Charles Dickens in Lowell: A Virtual Walking Tour: This website is the brainchild of Diana Archibald, * Secretary of The Dickens Society, and fuels a rising academic and civic interest in Dickens’ interactions with and visits to the States and Canada.
Dickens Journals Online: This project has digitized Dickens's original serials from Household Words and All the Year Round.
Mapping Projects: Mapping Emotions in Victorian London: Funded by a generous grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation and SESTA, this extremely interesting project charts the “emotional geography” of Victorian London. Every time an author mentions a place in London, the project lists the characters’ mood while in that place. The goal is to see whether Victorian authors generally described and considered the same places in the same way, which may provide an overall perspective of literary attitudes towards London!
NINES: Nineteenth Century Scholarship Online: Dickens’s journals such as Household Words and All the Year Round are digitized online here, providing unparalleled access to primary sources previously only available to research scholars and high-ranking academics.
Digital Dickens Notes Project: This project presents Dickens’s extant novel drafts and notes side-by-side with the finished product, and is of inestimable value to the student of textual studies.
Journal•Lists is a new service that allows users to sign up to receive email installments of historical diaries, letters, periodicals and novels on the days they were originally written or serialized. The next title is going to be Dickens’ Hard Times from the 1st of April on as in the original 1854 publication. Journal•Lists is a completely free service and users can unsubscribe at any time. Interested readers will need to sign up before the start date of 1 April to receive all of the entries (they can sign up afterwards of course, but will miss the earlier entries). They can sign up at the link above.
Placing Literature: The Dickens Society is carrying out the “Placing Dickens” portion of this project. To date, over 3,000 places have been mapped. Similar to MEVL, this is a global geographical project seeking to map all kinds of authors.
Project Boz: This project is an initiative by the George C. Gordon Library of Worcester Polytechnic Institute to digitize all of Charles Dickens's novels in their original serial form. Each of Dickens's novels, including roughly 12,000 pages of text, original advertisements, and illustrations, will be scanned: Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop, Barnaby Rudge, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey & Son, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
The Dickens Project: Concerned with investigating simultaneously historic and modern issues that appear throughout Dickens's oeuvre, the Dickens Project (founded in 1981 and headquartered at UC Santa Cruz) consists of faculty and graduate students from major American and international universities.
The Victorian Web: This website is well known as the oldest Victorian website of its kind. Digital “nodes” associate author with author, providing biographical details and primary sources, ultimately portraying the literary Victorian world as an interconnected “web.” Hence the name!
Note: * I am also indebted to Diana Archibald’s presentation on “Digital Dickens” at NeMLA 3/19/16 for the majority of this post. Note that she also singled out the site My Poetic Side: Dickens as an unreliable mapping project that contains historically unsubstantiated entries.
