DIGITAL VICTORIAN STUDIES TODAY

Abstract

Digital Victorian studies, as thefield might be called, has entered a new generation of endeavor. Of course, many older digital Victorian projects remain online and continue to be important resources for scholars working in a variety of areas. In the pantheon of the older projects we might include: The Victorian Web (Landow; 1987–2012), a long-standing project that presents an array of images and texts linked to the Victorian era as nodes in a complex network; the Rossetti Archive (McGann; 1993–2008), a comprehensive digital collection of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poetry, prose, and visual art as well as diverse contextual materials; NINES (2003-present), a nineteenth-century digital resource aggregator that facilitates integrated searching across a variety of sites and that provides peer review for relevant scholarly projects; the Old Bailey Online (Hitchcock; 2003–15), a large-scale venture that, among other things, makes available digital images and fully searchable, structured text of the 190,000 pages that constitute the Old Bailey Proceedings; and Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (ncse) (Brake; 2005–08), a rigorous edition of six nineteenth-century periodicals and newspapers that explores the issue of modeling nineteenth-century serials in digital form. Many other such projects might also be added. However, the rapid advance of web-based technologies has recently propelled the development of digital Victorian studies in multiple directions at once. The concurrent rise of digital humanities has also ensured that Victorian scholars now have ever more exciting options for creating and analyzing digital Victorian materials and ever more sophisticated questions for interrogating the process by which those materials are created.