Category: Digitizing the Victorians

Digital Clairvoyance: Lessons Learned by Text Mining the “Dr Slade Number” from 1876

Digitizing the Victorians, Other

The American medium Henry Slade was a nineteenth-century sensation. At the height of his career in the early 1870s he was considered one of the most extraordinary psychics of his generation. His main performance featured a type of supernormal communication where written messages, said to be from spirits existing beyond the veil, appeared on supposedly blank slates. It was a hugely popular act, and Slade toured all over North America and Europe demonstrating his incredible mediumship to broad and eager

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Neo-Victorian Afterlives: Time, Empire, and the Occult in Final Fantasy VIII

Digitizing the Victorians, Victorians Beyond the Academy

The Final Fantasy video game series is famous for its idiosyncratic narratives and eclectic references to different historical time periods. Often using concrete eras and locales as inspiration for their imagined fantasy-based worlds, the series has oscillated between medieval, steampunk, futuristic, Mediterranean, and Western settings. But what happens when a title modernizes specific aspects of nineteenth-century culture and represents them in a stylized format for the contemporary consumer? In the 1999 Japanese Role-Playing Game, Final Fantasy VIII, which was recently

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Podcasting (and) the Victorians

Digitizing the Victorians, Teaching the Victorians, Victorians Beyond the Academy

This is the second post in the ‘Crafting Communities’ series on JVC Online. See Part One and Part Three. When Thomas Edison debuted the phonograph in 1878, he circulated an ambitious list of possible uses. In addition to the reproduction of music, the use we most readily associate with his invention, Edison anticipated the creation of phonographic books for blind people. He also proposed applications with notably less traction, such as phonographic clocks designed to announce meal times. Noteworthy among

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The Industrial Devolution podcast

Digitizing the Victorians, Other, Victorians Beyond the Academy

The Industrial Devolution podcast is a new project by Dr. Tobias Wilson-Bates that seeks to think through many of the systems, practices, and aftereffects of the nineteenth century. In its first episode, Dr. Pearl Chaozon-Bauer and Dr. Sabrina Gilchrist lend their expertise to an exploration of the role dance plays in Jane Austen’s Emma (1815). By examining the text, the project seeks to explore how dance scenes’ narrative gravity was not only a product of good writing, but also a

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The rise and fall of the historical novel?

Digitizing the Victorians

Everyone agrees that the historical novel is an almost impossible genre to write successfully. Yet it keeps being written, and being successful. It’s having rather a boom in the early 21st century, with the success of Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy and others.  And it had its biggest boom in the early Victorian period, propelled into the limelight by Walter Scott and his Waverley novels, and proliferated by many anonymous and many now sidelined authors including John Galt, sisters Jane

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DIGITAL FORUM: ‘The Future of Academic Journals’ (21:1)

Digital Forum, Digitizing the Victorians, Published in JVC

‘The Future of Academic Journals’ edited by Zoe Alker, Christopher Donaldson and James Mussell. This Digital Forum offers perspectives on the opportunities and challenges presented by the use of digital technologies in academic publishing, networking and communication. It features position papers from three participants in the ‘Victorian Studies Journals: Coming of Age’ roundtable that convened at BAVS 2015: Lucinda Matthews-Jones, James Mussell and Helen Rogers. Collectively, these three scholars offer incisive reflections on the ways that scholars and publishers have

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Emily Bowles, “What’s to-day, my fine fellow?”: Classifying and Dating Tony Jordan’s ‘Dickensian’

Digitizing the Victorians, Exhibitions, Published in JVC, Television Shows, Victorians Beyond the Academy, Victorians on Display

Emily Bowles is a PhD candidate at the University of York. Her research focuses on Charles Dickens’s self-representation 1857-1870, and representations by Dickens’s friends and family 1870-1939. She is also a postgraduate representative for the Northern Nineteenth Century Network and assistant administrator for the Women’s Life Writing Network. You can find her on Twitter @EmilyBowles   I had been keeping an eye out for Dickensian since October 2014, when rumours of it echoed around the Dickens Day Conference in Senate

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Amy Milne-Smith, On the trail of madness: (Micro) media panics in the Victorian press

Digitizing the Victorians, Published in JVC

 Amy Milne-Smith is Associate Professor of History at Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada. She is the author of London Clubland: A Cultural History of Gender and Class in Late-Victorian Britain (2011) and several articles on the history of elite masculinity. Her current research focuses on representations and understandings of men’s mental illness both in public and private life. You can follow her on Twitter @AmyMilneSmith. This post accompanies Amy Milne-Smith’s Journal of Victorian Culture article, ‘Shattered Minds: Madmen on the Railways’, which can

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Emma Curry, ‘Dickensian’ panel discussion, featuring Tony Jordan and Professor Juliet John: Event Report

Digitizing the Victorians, Television Shows, Victorians Beyond the Academy

Emma Curry is a PhD candidate at Birkbeck, University of London and recently submitted her thesis, titled ‘Language and the Fragmented Body in the Novels of Charles Dickens’. Over the past eighteen months Emma has also been coordinating the ‘Our Mutual Friend Tweets’ project, a Twitter-based adaption of Dickens’s final completed novel. You can follow her on Twitter here: @EmmaLCurry “What if it was set inside Dickens’s mind?” With that single remark, it became clear that Tony Jordan’s new TV

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Vicky Nagy, Video games, the Victorian Era and Sherlock Holmes

Digitizing the Victorians, Victorians Beyond the Academy, Victorians in Film

Although a huge Sherlock Holmes fan, Victoria M Nagy researched female criminality during the mid-nineteenth century in Essex for her PhD which she graduated with in 2012 from Monash University. She is currently an Honorary Associate with La Trobe University and is working on a new project focusing on female criminality in the colony of Victoria from 1860 to 1900. Her book Nineteenth-Century Female Poisoners: Three English Women Who Used Arsenic to Kill is now available from Palgrave MacMillan. Her

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