Humlab Talk: Literary history with mass-digitised collections: Reading (in) the past

Abstract

In Australia in the 19th and early 20th centuries, newspapers were the main source of fiction, local and imported. Fast forward to the 21st century, and the National Library of Australia’s Trove database hosts the largest open-access, mass-digitized collection of historical newspapers internationally. This fortunate confluence of technological systems (newspapers and mass-digitization) made possible the discovery of a transnational collection of over 21,000 publications of novels, novellas and short stories in early Australian newspapers. With reference to this massively expanded record of fiction in Australia and Australian fiction, this paper poses some key questions for literary and reading history in the mass-digitised age. Is bigger always better in statistical literary research, or is the situation more complex? What new data-rich methods are useful for literary and reading history? And what happens to all this data when our projects finish? 

About Katherine Bode & Julia Pennlert

Katherine Bode is an associate professor of literary and textual studies at the Australian National University. She is the author or co-editor of books including A World of Fiction: Digital Collections and the Future of Literary History (2018), Advancing Digital Humanities: Research, Methods, Theories (2014), Reading by Numbers: Recalibrating the Literary Field (2012) and Resourceful Reading: eResearch, the New Empiricism, and Australian Literary Culture (2009).
  

Respondent Julia Pennlert is PhD in Comparative Literature (2018) and a lecturer in library-and information science at the Swedish School of Library and Information Studies (SLIS), University of Borås. She has recently finished a pilot project called "Literature through the ears" financed by the Swedish Library Associations and is currently working on a Swedish research-anthology on historical as well as contemporary perspectives on digital audiobooks (planned publication 2020) In her research Pennlert focus on digital modes of reading, digital humanities and how the contemporary media landscapes potentially affects the notions of readers, authors and literary texts. She is also one of the editors of a research-anthology on Digital Humanities in S