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Handling Newspapers
The Digital Antiquarian Conference
May 29, 2015
Mary Kelley
University of Michigan
In “Historical Haptics: Digital and Print Culture in the Nineteenth Century,”
Leon Jackson returns us to the older sense of the digital as “pertaining to the
fingers of the digits” and asks us how it works with and against the now
dominant meaning. There has been some remarkably fine scholarship on
handling print, he reminds us. In an essay that highlights the reciprocal
relationship between oral performance, scribal writing, and print publication,
Mathew Brown’s “Puritan Hand Piety” has made tangible the hand’s operation
in making a worshiper’s book of devotion. Leah Price has spoken to the more
general “hermeneutics of handling” in How To Do Things With A Book. There
are as well explorations of digital haptics. The question that Leon Jaackson sets
before us: how does tactility shape our experience of the printed and the digital
differently? Here, of course, we have the ideal opportunity to indulge in
nostalgia. It must be better to leaf, to linger, to hold, and to heft than to scroll
through remediated versions. Jackson refuses the temptation and asks us instead
to explore “historical haptics” as they shape the manipulation and handling of
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newspapers. In and with the digital, mouse and cursor, typing and touch screen
mediate our experience of reading. And yet traces relating to touch, texture,
weightiness, can be retained. Jackson asks us to consider a newspaper’s
dimensions. For the wife-avoiding husband caricatured by Fanny Fern and for
the fugitive slave Jesse Howell, size mattered. In both cases the paper’s
dimensions made possible in Erving Goffman’s memorable phrase “civil
inattention,” albeit in strikingly different circumstances.
The solution: more extensive curation, including measuring newspapers and
providing more extensive bibliographical description, including relative scaling
and haptic usage marks. For me these strategies recover a sense of the tactility I
myself experienced sitting under the generous dome reading the pages of the
Liberator that William Lloyd Garrison and his family had deposited here at AAS.
Each morning some of the newspaper’s issues were carefully placed in the
Society’s largest cradle. To the right sat my Mac ProBook open to Accessible
Archives and its run of the Liberator. I tacked back and forth between print and
digital, each playing its role in interpretation. With Accessible Archive, the
dimensions appeared the same whatever the issue, but with print, I was able to
see the Liberator expand in size: in September of 1833, it measured 51.2
centimeters in height and 36 centimeters in width, eight years later it had
expanded to 64.2 centimeters in height and 45.5 centimeters in width. I was able
to consider the degree to which this expansion could be explained by the increase
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in subscriptions of African Americans, the paper’s strongest and most reliable
supporters.
Of course, it was William Lloyd Garrison who suggested that Lydia Maria Child
be appointed to the editorship of the National Antislavery Standard. And it is
Klein’s digital tool that makes possible thematic analysis of Child’s coverage of
domestic issues during her editorship, or as Garrison’s phrased it information for
the “domestic circle.” Did Child include more coverage? It appears she did.
Codework significantly expands our analytic possibilities as Klein shows in
taking us through a series of archives. But does it necessarily entail “carework,”
or labor undertaken out of a sense of responsibility for others? Did Child also
commit herself to “carework?” Yes, as Lauren argues, she did, especially in the
editing of the Standard after its merger with the Pennsylvania Freeman. For Klein
“carework” has important implications for us as it did for Child. In the
discussion that follows, I hope we can consider the issue of responsibilities,
especially in terms of attending to the margins, to the gaps in our archive. How
do we do so? And how will our digital archive be shaped by our intervention?
In “Translatio Studii and the TEI: Caribbean Newspapers, Networks, and New
Knowledge Production,” Elizabeth Dillon asks us consider a related series of
questions about digital archives. What knowledge is being transformed (or as
she correctly notes being created) and to whom is it being transferred? Using as
her vehicle a digital archive of Caribbean newspapers that she and her colleagues
have been creating, Dillon explores the relations between knowledge and power.
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Of course, and perhaps most obviously, the digital archive promises infinite
access and endless accumulation. However, both access and accumulation are
shaped by relations of power. How, then, can texts by white colonials and
imperial administrations be read and studied? Can an archive created by
colonialism shed light on and give value to the lives of enslaved and indigenous
peoples? No, Simon Gikandi tells us. Those who created the archive made the
African into a debased object. They also denied slaves the technologies of
reading and writing. Dillon offers us an alternative. Currently, the design of an
archive is predicated on the aggregation of existing databases, as we know.
Rather than reading them as transparent, as forms of knowledge production that
cannot be manipulated, we can reshape, recontextualize, and remix them.
Generic disruption and revision can take a variety of forms, as she shows us. The
one I found most striking was the tagging of slave narratives embedded within
longer texts, extracting them and compiling them into a narrative. The act of
disembedding changes what is enunciated, as Dillon observes. Authority once
the exclusive domain of the colonial can now claimed by the enslaved and
subaltern knowledge can be brought to the fore. In the discussion, I look
forward to considering this form of labor: might we see it as a form of
“carework?”
Newspapers in eighteenth-century London performed their own remix, as Will
Slauter shows. The Grub Street Journal he presents compiled and juxtaposed
information from eight to ten newspapers. The purpose was satire. Richard
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Russel, who adopted the pseudonym Jeffrey Quidnunc (Latin What now?),
skewered politicians, lawyers, and physicians, as Slauter notes. Russel’s debt to
Alexander Pope whose Dunciad ridiculed writers and editors with a mock heroic
poem encased in an absurdist editorial apparatus. In the use of a pseudonym
and in his satire, Russel’s performance resembled the practices of London’s
salons and tea tables with their charades and various games of entertainment.
Russel’s Grub Street Journal can be seen as an archive in its own right.
Compiling juxtaposing verbatim reports, he highlighted the need to consult
multiple sources. The goal in this remix is enhanced authenticity, a goal shared
by Dillon and her colleagues in extracting the stories of slaves and reinserting
them into the archive. The same can be said for Klein’s codework which brings
us the many dimension of Lydia Maria Child. And now it is time to turn to the
remix that you in the audience bring to these papers.