Week 4: website discovery!

 

This week I am focusing on some of the websites that are considered "commercial websites." The two websites that stood out to me were the Gale site and the NCCO (Nineteenth-Century Collections Online) site. Gale is a site that is clearly is looking for a profit, yet I can understand having to offset the cost of digitising such a large body of work. It is important not only to digitize as the periodicals and newspapers of the nineteenth century, but also to answer some of the questions that were raised in class (Digitizing the Victorians) this week.

 

One of those questions was, "does it matter if the text that is shown is the full page as it appeared in the original newspaper/periodical?" I would answer that it is important. Not for some of the reasons that were mentioned, such as what if was around influenced the author of a particular piece (examples of Dickens's work changing because he saw a news piece about an orphan named Pip was thrown around) but because I think that pieces should be considered in their full context as they were meant to be.

 

There were many books that we read today in full that were originally serialized in periodicals or newspapers. I know that there are probably a lot of Victorian examples of such works (Dickens of course comes to mind) but the one I am most familiar with is Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. The fact that this work was serialized originally is important because it *should* change how we read the book as  a whole. If someone wonders why Stowe seems to be repeating her storyline over and over within the novel, it is because originally the book was read week to week and she was reminding her readers what had happened previously. As modern readers, we can be annoyed by the repetition, but readers of that time would have found it essential to understanding the book as a whole. Another reason I think that reading it within the context is such a good idea is because of the fact that the surrounding material does matter only for historical reasons. I am not so interested in how Stowe might have been influenced by what articles were around her work, but more about the editorial reasoning behind what they chose to include right around each section of her work. If it was an abolitionist newspaper, they might have included news of an upcoming rally. If it was more of a neutral newspaper, and it was a re-printing of her work it is possible that there might have been an advertisement of an Anti-Tom novel that were also popular at the time. This is important in a New Historical perspective as we consider what the historical implications of serializing were.

 

As far as the NCCO site is concerned, hmmm how do I love this site? Let me count the ways. Okay bad literary example aside, I really did like this site. They had informative video that let you see behind the scenes and into the how the website is designed and How Much Work really goes into digitizing all the works. The site was easy to navigate and I felt that unlike some of the sites that we have looked at already, this site really went beyond to be as user-friendly as possible. They were also very forthcoming about how their site works and how they digitize the periodicals and nineteenth century works. There were even "fact sheets" provided for different sections.