PhD researcher at Durham University working on 19th-century literature & technology

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Conference Paper: BSLS 2013

I’ll be speaking on a panel convened by Dr Greg Lynall on the subject of literature and technology at the 2013 annual British Society for Literature and Science (BSLS) conference in April at Cardiff University. My paper specifically discusses technology in motion, exploring the phenomenology of mechanics and process, of technology at work, and considers how it works within contemporary narrative structures and textual registers. The abstract is reproduced below.

‘Something in Motion’: Victorian Literature, Visual Technology, and the Phenomenology of Process

When Charles Dickens wrote, in a letter of 1857, that the Manchester Art Treasurers Exhibition lacked ‘something in motion’, he was participating in a mid-nineteenth-century debate on the nature of visual experience and modes of looking. Importantly, his letter also gestures towards the role of technology with the further comment that for attendees ‘The thing is too still, after their lives of machinery’. The art exhibition’s required way of seeing and its static spectacle is figured in opposition to a simultaneous cultural interest in, and even desire for, a visual experience of the moving image that was enabled through a variety of optical technologies at the mid-century.

This interest in motion and technology was encouraged by Dickens and his contemporaries through the linguistic choices and representational strategies employed in Victorian fiction. In addressing the broad relationship between literature and technology, this paper focuses specifically on moving image devices in order to explore the impact and textual rendering of a newly mechanised experience of vision upon mid-century fiction. Offering an overview of optical motion technologies, from the kaleidoscope to dissolving magic lantern slides, this paper contends that both the visual spectacle and the procedural operation of these devices entered the language of fiction. Further, their reliance on the hand of the user to create a moving image (through cranking a handle or spinning a drum) provokes a consideration of theories of haptic perception and points towards the importance of touch in Victorian technology. This paper then argues that a sensorial approach which attends to the evident mechanical processes embedded in the design of moving image devices and linguistically present in Victorian fiction can offer a new reading of the connection between literature and technology.

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phenakistiscope

The phenakistiscope, invented in the 1830s, gave one of the nineteenth century’s  first moving images.  When looking through the disc’s apertures into a mirror and spinning the wheel, the sequence of images would appear as one continually moving scene. See here for an animation of its spectacle on the Bill Douglas Centre’s website.

Above: image courtesy of the Bill Douglas Centre, University of Exeter, 69236.
Top right: Museum of the History of Science, Oxford, online exhibition.

Posted by  |  January 22, 2013 | Categories: BSLS, Early cinema, Material culture, Motion, Technology, Vision | Leave A Comment »

Conference Paper – Dickens & Visual Technology

I’ll be giving a paper at a conference on ‘Forms of Innovation‘ at Durham University, 12 September 2012. The title of my talk is ‘Dickens, Visual Technology, and the Mobile Eye‘. I’ll be discussing in detail three mid-century forms of moving image technology–the diorama, dissolving magic lantern slides, and persistence of vision devices like the zoetrope–and offering a reading of their significance within Dickens’s fiction from 1846-57. Certain words and longer phrases carry traces of the action, eqipment, and spectacle of these mechanical optical devices, and by paying attention to these textual markers of Dickens’s contemporary visual and material culture we can understand more about the nature of nineteenth-century perception, imagination, and the significance of technology.

 

 

A ‘protean view’, or diorama, entitled ‘Napoleon on Elba’.
(Bill Douglas Centre, University of Exeter, ref 70213)

Posted by  |  August 9, 2012 | Categories: Dickens, Material culture, Technology, Vision | Leave A Comment »

Conference Report: ‘Transforming Objects’

‘Transforming Objects’
University of Northumbria, 28-29 May 2012 (supported by BAVS)
Co-organised by myself and Anna Hope.

http://myblogs.informa.com/jvc/files/2012/06/TransObPoster-A4.jpg

This two-day conference hosted papers that addressed the transformation of objects and the transformations effected by objects from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Object theory and discourses of materiality largely engage with objects as stable items of a permanent nature; as the conference co-organiser, I was keen to attract papers which sought to address those moments which slip through the gaps of such readings and explore the process of transformation and the between-ness or not fully realised state of an object. We received a fantastic response, allowing us to run parallel panels across the two days. This report reflects my particular research interests in the nineteenth century, but paper topics ranged from Daniel Defoe to Thomas Pynchon with panels considering domestic items in Elizabeth Gaskell’s fiction, the transformation of national identity through travelling objects, curatorial practices and the creation of artworks based on museum collections, transformations of the book as object, and the significance of souvenirs and kitsch objects.

Day One

‘Naming and Placing Nineteenth-Century Technology’

Prof. David Wheeler (Armstrong Atlantic State) opened with a paper on the ‘Iron Bridge, Coalbrookdale, and Early Industrial Tourism’. Wheeler argued that the Iron Bridge (built 1779) functioned as a destination for recreational travellers keen to see this product of industrial manufacture, aided by commissioned artworks which imagined the bridge as a gateway to a newly transformed landscape of modernity and industrialisation. Kate Katigbak (Durham) addressed the intersection of mechanisation, reality, and imagination in Victorian narratives of technology. Speaking on ‘Machine as Monster, Machine as God: Building the Character of Industry’, Katigbak identified patterns of mythic narrative and metaphor which worked to document, examine, and explain the effect of industrialisation on Victorian Britain. Courtney Salvey (Kent), in her paper on ‘Meaning Machines: the Linguistic Transformation of Machines in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, argued against a narrative of technological determinism and pointed out the changing understandings of machines as they were constructed in popular literature and made comprehensible to the general reader through visual aids, diagrams, and glossaries of terms. Closing the panel was Jack Rundell (York) with a paper on ‘Roller Skating into Mass Culture’. Using archival sources, his paper demonstrated how, on the expiration of the George Plimpton’s patent in 1883, roller skates became items of industrial mass production for a public eager to purchase new consumer items and join in the craze of ‘rinking’, and his conclusion established an interconnection of technology, commodity, leisure, and mass culture.

‘Altered States’

Dr Greg Lynall (Liverpool) began the panel with an account of ‘‘The Sun it self’s here in a piece of glasse’: the between-ness of the burning mirror’’. His paper looked at the optical history of burning mirrors from their early ‘magical’ phantasmagoric effects to their use as an instrument of Enlightenment technology, and addressed what he termed the ‘aesthetic terrain’ of the mirror. Dr James Mussell (Birmingham) spoke on ‘Chlorodyne: Telling Transformative Tales about a Drug Whose ‘Composition Cannot be Discovered’’. Chlorodyne was a potent mix of drugs and was used as a pain reliever for a number of ailments. Taking us through a history of its advertisements, descriptive wrappers, and patent issues, Mussell demonstrated that material culture and object history is recreated through layers of telling. His paper led on to a discussion of nineteenth-century regulatory practices and medical description, gesturing towards issues of naming and construction. Mark Blacklock (Birkbeck) closed the panel with a paper on ‘Higher-dimensional thinking things: recreating Hinton’s cubes’ which explored the mental exercise demanded by Charles Howard Hinton’s coloured cubes. Using a number of contemporary accounts, Blacklock explained how the user attempted to imagine a four-dimensional cube through colour combination, visualisation, and memory, and spoke more broadly on the psychological and cultural impact of the cubes.

‘Transforming Art: the Pre-Raphaelites and Science’

The day ended with a keynote from Dr John Holmes (Reading). His paper explored the painting, sculpture, and poetry of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood (PRB) in relation to the methods of contemporary scientific investigation. Through a close reading of articles and poetry from The Germ (the PBR periodical which ran for four issues in 1850) Holmes drew out a number of references to terms such as ‘observation’, ‘fact’, and ‘truth to nature’. He argued that the scientific aim of detailed observation leading to ‘true’ knowledge was drawn on by the PRB in an attempt to transform their art practice. Holmes’s argument was further developed by a focus on the marvellously intricate level of detail in the water, rocks, and cattle of Pre-Raphaelite landscape paintings. Holmes asserted that this was an attempt to capture the natural environment in a way that even photography at this time could not manage. The Pre-Raphaelite brush therefore became a new form of technology for the capture and display of a scene with scientifically-observed accuracy and denotes, for Holmes, an embrace of scientific principles and approaches in their works. He is the recipient of an AHRC Fellowship (Oct 2012 – June 2013) to develop this research.

Day Two

‘Curating Memory and Identity through Objects’

Jessica Allsop (Exeter) spoke on ‘Issues of Inheritance: Curious Objects of the Country House Collection in Late-Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth-Century Literature’ in which she engaged with moments of collection and curation in a selection of late-nineteenth-century texts and spoke on issues of containment, preservation, and inheritance. Following this was Graeme Pedlingham (Sussex) with a paper entitled ‘Something was going from me – the capacity, as it were, to be myself’: Richard Marsh’s The Beetle and the ‘Transformational Object’’. The human form of the beetle in Marsh’s tale is, for Pedlingham, an unsettling figuration of process and a continual coming-into-being and links the tale to its contemporary context of interest in the boundary between self and world. Camilla Cassidy (Oxford) concluded the panel with a talk on ‘‘Frozen, Lunar Landscapes’: Objects, Souvenirs, and Relics in George Eliot’s Romola (1862-3)’. Cassidy argued that objects operate in Eliot’s historical fiction as prompts to memory and enablers of narrative twists and reversals. The panel illuminated various approaches to working on objects in fiction, and I was struck by how much abundance matters here: focusing less on single objects, the panellists all found importance in the mass of objects and in the text’s curation of their meaning.

‘Paper in Process’

Claire Friend (Edinburgh) reconstructed the story of ‘Rag-Grubbers to Rich Men, Making Paper in Eighteenth-Century Edinburgh’, making the point that linen picks up a multitude of dirt and dust which then is incorporated into the paper recycled from its rags. Paper, then, was itself a transformed object which incorporated any number of miscellaneous objects from its previous incarnation. Dr Eugenia Gonzales (Ohio State) then gave a paper on ‘The Work of Fairies: Deconstruction and Imagination in Victorian Narratives of Doll Production’. The insides of dolls, themselves made of recycled paper and rags, showed them as items of mass manufacture, yet as Gonzalez argues this demonstration of materiality was not an impediment to imaginative play but its ‘raw materials’, encouraging the narrativisation of the toy’s history. Katie McGettigan (Keele) developed her argument of materiality and narrative with ‘Transforming the Book: Material Metaphors and the Literary Marketplace in Moby-Dick’. Arguing against previous critics, McGettigan provided a persuasive account of how industry, commercialisation, and the marketplace was not a constraint on Melville’s creativity but rather a productive engagement and through a focus on metaphor demonstrated that the poetics of exchange are mirrored by the values of commodity exchange in Moby-Dick.

Roundtable: ‘Single- and Multi-Author Blogging Models’

Dr Lucinda Matthews-Jones (Liverpool John Moores), co-editor of the Journal of Victorian Culture Online, chaired the session and has written a fantastic report on the discussion, which can be found here. The participants were Martin Paul Eve (Sussex), Dr Kieran Fenby-Hulse (Bradford), Dr Charlotte Mathieson (Warwick), and Dr James Mussell (Birmingham). After introductions, the discussion addressed what the single- and multi-authored blog might look like and Charlotte Mathieson described her successful experiences with alternative forms of blogging, such as podcasts and video. Kieran Fenby-Hulse then asked about our ‘imagined audience’ and questioned how types of readership might affect both the style of blogging. Panellists pointed out that the multi-author model might require a more academic voice, whereas the single-authored blog, as James Mussel suggested, is often used to document academic practice and build a personal narrative around the research topic. Finally, the panel looked in more detail at the multi-author model and the role of the editor: might the review process mean that contributions are considered a more acceptable form of peer-reviewed output that the single-author blog post? Martin Paul Eve commented that to write for both forms of blog enables the author to drive traffic to each site, thereby increasing and potentially sustaining a regular readership. Deciding to create or contribute to one form of blog does not necessarily negate participation in the other; rather, as the roundtable showed, both formats have specific uses and values, the combination of which can potentially benefit both the researcher and their readership.

‘Transforming Time: Cowper, Correspondence, and Chronometry’

The final speaker of the conference was Dr Sarah Haggarty (Newcastle) who spoke on temporality in eighteenth-century letter-writing and the connected cultural effects of the post. Contending that clock time drew experience away from its local context, her paper focused on William Cowper’s correspondence to show that, in his example, time was local, subjective, and embedded in the personal epistolary relationship. Her talk developed to make a case for correspondence, or the systematic back and forth of sending and receiving, as a contract which demanded reciprocity across time by evoking the ‘metronome of the post’ and ‘rhythms of epistolary expectations’. Lost, late, or not returned letters complicated this scheme, and drew the correspondents to enact on the page their strategies of managing intervals between letters: waiting and wondering were addressed and described within the content of the letter. In this way, Haggarty argued that epistolary silence is always the regular mode, but that receiving letters breaks this temporal limbo and retrospectively remakes silences into waiting.

Our thanks go to the British Society of Victorian Studies (BAVS) for generously supporting the event and allowing us to offer a reduced conference fee and a number of postgraduate travel bursaries.

This conference report was first placed online at the Journal of Victorian Culture Online blog. My thanks for their permission to reproduce it here.

Posted by  |  July 13, 2012 | Categories: BAVS, Conference report, Material culture, Objects | Leave A Comment »

Conference Report: BAVS 2011

BAVS 2011: ‘Composition and Decomposition’
University of Birmingham, 1-3 September

The organisers of this year’s conference asked delegates to consider the double meaning of composition and its inverse, decomposition. Suggested subjects ranged between recycling, inventories, print culture, scientific processes, degeneration, town planning, and musical composition.

The wide selection of papers addressed the theme predominately in terms of movement: the movement of composition, of making, and the movement of process and span between an initial formation and the end-point of decomposition, the unmaking, undoing, unravelling of a thing previously made. In a paper on the history of the gyroscope by Lina Hakim, the counterpoint, the momentary act of stasis between composition and decomposition, was even discussed.

The three-day event included a good number of papers given by postgraduate research students, and the first day began with a warm welcome to all postgrad delegates. There was a hustings on the second day to elect a new postgraduate representative to sit on the executive committee of BAVS. Allison Neal, of the University of Hull, was successful, so congratulations must go to her. She is keen to work hard in representing the experience of all PhDs, so please feel free to contact her (a.neal@hull.ac.uk) with any issues or suggestions over the next year.

The first paper I attended was presented by Anne-Marie Beller and entitled ‘M. E. Braddon and Composition: Production and Proliferation’. Beller argued that Braddon’s writing habits (often, and fast) which were at times denounced in the popular press, worked to raise questions about the status of authorship as a practice in the period. Henry Mansel’s comments in the Quarterly Review (113, April 1863) likened this type of writerly proliferation to shop manufacture. Further points raised included the legitimacy of literary labour when its composition was thought to be too swift, and the change in the 1860s which negatively linked popular authorship to mechanistic discourses of literary production. During questions, Beller hinted at an important further issue: that this compositional distaste arose not solely because of production modes but because of genre and readership.

Katherine Inglis’s paper linked Thomas Carlyle’s laystall with the paper-mill in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend. Quoting from Sartor Resartus, Inglis noted that the reader is here figured as a waste-maker, as books ‘returned thither’ to their place of manufacture without being read, the cycle of composition and decomposition unable here to be broken even by a reader. Focusing on the waste paper, rags, and cloths in Dickens’s novel, Inglis argues for a mutually enforcing theory of composition and its opposite, questioning how far a form must be broken down before it qualifies as waste, if ever at all.

The next paper I attended was Michael Davis’s, who was speaking on ‘Mind and Matter in The Picture of Dorian Grey’. This paper addressed chemistry, materiality, psychology, and atom theory in Wilde’s novel. Davis’s paper looked at the work of philosophers W K Clifford (who was read by Wilde) and William James, and discussed the relationship between mind and matter in Dorian Grey. Clifford’s concept of ‘mind-stuff’ becomes ‘cell-soul’ in Wilde, Davis argues. The mental activity of producing impressions in the mind creates matter, and the mind is active in shaping the data it receives. This two-way relationship means, as Davis points out, that consciousness not does not merely take in external impressions but can exert ‘meaningful’ change of own agency. ‘Data is sifted to produce a distillate’, his paper explained. The application of Davis’s paper to Wilde’s novel results in an emphasis on Basil’s painting of Dorian as a collection of atoms, able to be manipulated and changed materially by the mental activity and molecular chemistry of Dorian’s mind. The paper is an early part of Davis’s current project, a study on atoms and consciousness, in which he aims to theorise subjectivity in relation to physiology and evolution.

In a panel on serialisation and modes of composition, Jude Piesse gave an excellent paper, ‘Decomposing Great Expectations: Reading Migration in Serial Form’ which argued for weekliness as a compositional rhythm and narrative trajectory of Dickens’s serialised novel. Piesse linked the magazine context of the novel as it appeared serially in All the Year Round to its theme – each serial was surrounded by articles on migration and travelling, and thus Great Expectations was read by its contemporaries as part of this cultural milieu, demonstrating ‘the difficulties of going home in a moving world’. The paper further linked the novel’s events (notably Pip’s weekly visits to Miss Havisham’s residence) to its weekly serialised form. Of particular note in this paper was her illumination of the migration of character formation as the serialised story travelled to the US in Harper’s Weekly magazine, in which Biddy appeared in a pope’s hat, and Magwitch was recomposed as a typical American villain.

I’ve already made mention of Lina Hakim’s paper on ‘Making and Unmaking a Scientific Instrument’, the object here being the gyroscope. Hakim drew our attention to what she terms a ‘gyroscopic imagination’ and ‘morphic resonance’ in the works of Yeats and Hardy, linking these authors to their scientific context. Another paper on Hakim’s panel, on technology and machines, was James Emmott’s ‘Parameters of Vibration, Technologies of Capture, and the Layering of Voices and Faces in the Nineteenth Century’ which described the drawing back movement of composite photographs. They are ‘discontinuous and serial’, tells Emmott, as the early nineteenth-century ideas of stasis melts into notions of flow of the 1870s and 1880s. You can find a version of this paper published in Victorian Studies (53:3, Spring 2011) here.

One of the four plenary papers particularly resonated with my research: Colin Cruise’s talk on ‘Arranging Meanings: Pre-Raphaelite Compositions and Narratives’. Showing a selection of Pre-Raphaelite paintings, his talk assessed the ‘move towards surface’ of Ford Madox Brown’s work specifically, drawing attention to the ‘visual puzzles and pools of clarity’ apparent as the eye makes its way over Chaucer at the Court of Edward III (1851). When considering The Last of England (1855), Cruise notes the aperture framing of the circular painting, linking it to new developments such as photography. I would go further, however, and direct attention not just to the circular shape of the canvas, but to the concentric movement which the form of the painting itself seems to demand of its viewer. Our gaze is directed swiftly around the edges of the painting in a circular line traced by the ship’s ropes, then dragged up and over the heads of the two central figures to fall on the passengers in the background, before being whisked off again down the arm of the male figure and up to the face of the central woman. Our gaze stops at their eyes which, as Cruise points out, look slightly off to the side, but which are central enough to pin the viewer into the uneasy feeling of being stared back at from within the canvas.

Following this was a panel on medicine and science. Will Tattersdill gave a lively and engaging paper, ‘Composing the Pigeon-Holes: Science and Fiction in the late-Victorian Periodical Press’. Making the point that categories answer not to content but rather to practices of curating, Tattersdill urged us to think about the meaning of categories when we encounter them for what they say about the culture that composed them. His particular research specialisation formed the basis of his paper, and so discussion led on to science, fiction and the role of the periodical in forming literary categories in the 1890s. Tattersdill called for a scholarship model which assesses the nineteenth century through its own lens, before specialisation and the boundary line of segregation between the arts and sciences. Following this interdisciplinary (or should I say undisciplinary?) method, Pamela K. Gilbert presented on ‘Emotional Expression and Self-Control’. This paper was drawn from work on what will be her next book-length study, and focused on the theories of emotion and expression in the works of Charles Bell. Gilbert drew links between Bell’s work and actors composing facial expressions in the domain of the theatre, highlighting the issue of ‘authenticity or performance’ in such self-compositions.

The final paper of the conference that I attended was Charlotte Matheison’s ‘‘A Perambulating Mass of Woollen Goods’: Bodily Composition in mid-Nineteenth Century Railway Representation’. This paper took the railway as its subject and discussed its presence in Victorian novels as both a symbol of and an active participant in capitalist modernity and the homogeneity of mass production. Placing emphasis on the human body as it experienced this new mode of travel, Matheison spoke about the anxieties of travelling on this new ‘industrial machine’. Looking to Robert Audley in Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, Matheison’s paper argued that his rug-wrapped body referenced Ruskin’s notion of the body being parcelled up in railway transport. Robert is protected, Matheison argued, but his body is also hidden away from view. Coddled like this, Robert becomes the parcel of mass consumerism, a travelling commodity, as his individuality is lost amongst the railway rugs and he becomes a freight of commercial exchange.  This represents how ‘texts were working to accommodate the body into industrial modernity’, as the paper argues.

The final plenary panel involved four speakers: Shearer West, Head of Humanities at Oxford University; Regenia Gagnier, current BAVS president; Sarah Parker, a third-year PhD student at the University of Birmingham; and Linda Bree, Arts and Literature editor at Cambridge University Press. The topic of discussion was ‘What is the Use of Victorian Studies in the Twenty-First Century?’ Shearer West began by questioning what the institution of the University is for, and what its civic duty, if any, should be. Moving on to address the impact of academia more generally in public life, West argued that although researchers could have more input into public policy decisions, the policy-makers were not interested in opening a dialogue between the two streams. However, to qualify this, West also stated that researchers should take more of an active role in promoting what they know to policy-makers, and be clear in how this could be of use in public life. Linda Bree’s statement followed this. She claimed that although Victorian studies was ‘resilient’ in publisher’s minds, they are increasingly looking for those manuscripts which took a broader view instead of those treating their subject with a narrow perspective. The crossed wire between the desires of publishers and those of the academy itself seemed all the more stark when Sarah Parker spoke next of the experience of postgraduates. Claiming that it was impossible to overestimate the anxiety surrounding publications, jobs, and even whether those academic jobs of the future will be anything like those which postgraduates are currently training for, Parker’s final statement, that ‘it is not about where established scholars are, but where we [the postgraduate community] is going’, expressed the opinions of many in the audience and persuasively put across the urgency with which the academy must address the future of Victorian studies within universities and must consider new models of research and training to ensure that a generation of future scholars do not become lost in the backlog of the job market. Following this, Regenia Gagnier spoke about the importance of collaboration and the worth of the university to its society – that knowledge is good for its own sake, and should be treated as such. PhD students are ‘applied humanists’, she argued. Her talk closed with a reminder that there is a lot of effort being put in to disseminating ideas and getting knowledge out there from within Victorian studies, and the humanities more widely, especially through large organisations such as BAVS. The university system may be changing, but work in this field is ever-strong and can play an important role both within its own disciplinary confines and outside the ivory tower as it engages with public life and interest, and the plenary panel of speakers from opposite ends of the academic career spectrum summarised this mood well.

I’ll look forward to next year’s BAVS conference, held at the University of Sheffield, and addressing the theme of ‘Victorian Values’.

Posted by  |  October 4, 2011 | Categories: BAVS, Conference report | Leave A Comment »

Degas, Motion, and Technology

Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement
Royal Academy, Sept-Dec 2011

This new exhibition at the Royal Academy aims to place Degas in a new context – that of motion image technologies. Taking in a background which includes the popularity of photography and the carte de visite, experiments in motion-image capture by Muybridge and Marey, and the Lumière’s 1895 demonstration of film in Montmartre, Ann Dumas, the exhibition’s co-curator, hopes that this exhibition will shed light on Degas’s ballet paintings and photographs, and show the artist to be more than simply a ‘chocolate box’ painter but one who was at the centre of the late-nineteenth-century’s technological inventions.

Posted by  |  September 25, 2011 | Categories: Art, Motion, Technology | Leave A Comment »

Workshop Report: Dickens Journals Online

Dickens, Journalism, and Forms of Publishing
8 July 2911

Senate House, Institute of English Studies (University of London)

Organised by the Dickens Journals Online team (John Drew and Tony Williams) and Holly Furneaux (University of Leicester).

I recently attended a postgraduate training workshop focused on the  digitisation of two important journals that Dickens edited and wrote for:  Household Words (1850-1858) and All the Year Round (1859-1870). The  event aimed to introduce a small number of postgraduates to the Dickens  Journals Online project and provide practical training sessions on working  in the digital humanities, digitisation and, more generally, forms of Victorian  publishing and the periodical press. The Dickens Journals Online project,  begun in 2006, is being directed by Dr John Drew at the University of  Buckingham with   the aim of launching as a fully open access online  resource in 2012, the year of Dickens’s centenary.   The  project will digitise  the entire run of HW and ATYR, and will offer both high-quality page scans  and  a fully searchable text transcription. It will form an excellent resource  for researchers, teachers, and   students of many disciplines across the  humanities. Further, the organisers have been active in making   sure this  project will have as broad an appeal as possible for all strata of education,  reaching beyond   higher education to promote the resource and its potential for a number of schools. As the completed   project will not be restricted by a need for institutional affiliation, its open access format will ensure that all members of the public can use the resource from any computer.

The rest of the day involved a variety of speakers discussing the issues, challenges, and achievements of research in the digital humanities. The keynote was given by Laurel Brake, Professor Emerita of Literature and Print Culture at Birkbeck, University of London, who has published widely on all aspects of nineteenth-century journalism and steered the digitisation project Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition.  Brake spoke of the possibilities of remediating archival materials through digitisation and of online resources allowing collaboration and comment of the research process as it occurs, refiguring feedback as a continual activity rather than a final comment. I think this is a really worthwhile aspect of putting research online, and can of course also be used to advantage in teaching by encouraging students to ‘show their working out’, thus enabling continuous feedback of their methods and ideas. Laurel Brake also discussed more practical issues with the group, highlighting the importance of project management training specific to the humanities and of acquiring (at the least) a workable level of technical skill. Her talk drew attention to the changing landscape of academic publishing and the necessity of becoming digitally literate in this new environment. Brake’s provocative statement that ‘print looks inert [and] finite’ was drawn into focus by the DJO project in its attempt to provide more than a digitised image of a page of text.

Perhaps a multiplicity of form has always been part of the trajectory of these journals though. In a talk by the project directors Dr. John Drew and Dr Tony Williams on the history of the project so far,  Drew noted that some issues of Household Words had been found uncut and unstitched. Instead the full 24 pages were printed onto one sheet which had been folded to form a booklet. This ‘hybridity in the original materiality’ of HW and ATYR is reflected the current incarnation of the journals as both page image and searchable interactive text.

 The final panel of the day brought together four people working in or alongside academia and the digital humanities: Gerhard Brey (Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London), Dennis Duncan (Dandelion), Pamela Mason (AHRC), and Heather Tilley (19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century). Gerhard Bray highlighted some of the tools technology could bring to analyses of literature, such as the ability to visualise in graph form concordances or the relationship between specific keywords. Heather Tilley then gave a generous background to the online open access peer-review journal 19 and explained some of the behind-the-scenes issues involved in establishing a leading journal of its type in the field, such as working with software providers and designing the site. Next, prompted by a question from Laurel Brake, Pamela Mason spoke on the AHRC’s commitment to providing training provision for scholars working in the digital humanities. Finally Dennis Duncan talked about the opportunities for postgraduates to get involved with the online research network and journal Dandelion, which, along with offering a forum for discussion and publication opportunities for early career researchers, provides internships and training events in editing and running an online journal.

A generous wine reception marked the end of a successful workshop and allowed much discussion of Dickens’s journals themselves, the digitisation and text correction project, and the wider issues relating to digital technology and scholarship in general. All were in agreement that the Dickens Journalism Online project is a worthwhile thing to be involved with, and that it will provide a fantastic resource for research and teaching when it is officially launched in 2012. I would urge anyone who is interested to sign up and contribute to the project as it will certainly enhance a reading of Dickens’s journalistic writing and editorship, and is a brilliant entry point for those who have yet to encounter the journals themselves.

Posted by  |  July 10, 2011 | Categories: Conference report, Dickens, Digitisation | Leave A Comment »

Conference Report: ‘The Second Birth of Cinema’

‘The Second Birth of Cinema’
Newcastle University, 1-2 July 2011

Andrew Shail, the organiser of this international event, opened the conference by explaining his rationale: the conference aimed to mark the centenary of the ‘second birth of cinema’, an historiographical model based on the theory of media development originally proposed by André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion in Convergence (8:4, 2001). The call for papers asked participants to respond to this statement:

If, as André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion have recently insisted, cinema was born once as a technology and then again as a medium, just when and how did this occur? What caused film practice, the film business and film discourse all to generate a media identity for cinema? How did we get from ‘animated photography’ to ‘the pictures’?

Over two days delegates heard a range of papers which responded to these questions. All speakers focused on 1911, but not all agreed that it was the year of cinema’s ‘second birth’: some dated this a year earlier or later, others (myself included) had trouble ascribing any year as a marker, feeling uneasy about using the terminology of inception at all. I’m not quite sure if the pummeling Andrew Shail asked for in his introduction occurred, but tentative fists certainly pushed the debate forward.

First, a keynote from Joe Kember, of the University of Exeter, who gave details of a recent AHRC-funded project based at Exeter and involving Kember and his colleage, John Plunkett, along with two PhD research students, to map the history of screen projection and entertainment in the South West, 1820-1914. A book resulting from this three-year project is due to be published in 2012. Sources consulted have been extremely varied, as Kember demonstrated: details of exhibitions have been found in the usual places, such as the local press, but the team also studied police reports to gauge attendance and reaction to visual shows in this period. His talk also queried models of linearity. Kember put forward the idea of ‘biological adaptation’ as a way to think about the evolution of media within its own institutional limits, responding and adapting to its local environment rather than making a series of defined leaps forward.

Of particular interest to me was Joshua Yumibe who spoke on colour in early cinema reels. He put forward that the use of colour enabled a stereoscopy of viewing as the densely coloured figures appeared to stand out in relief from the background of the film strip. This projective movement echoed but inverted the effect of the nineteenth-century stereoscope, which also created a 3D vision but drew the eye backwards through the deep space of the image. He links this forward motion to the famous example of the Lumière’s train racing towards the viewer from the depths of the screen. Yumibe then drew attention to contemporary debates on the strength of colour. Deep tones were labeled gaudy, excessive, and sensationalist, and were liable to produce a ‘foreign impact’ on the spectator. Subtler colouring was preferred, presumably because it didn’t induce eye-fatigue, but also, as Yumibe argued, because it gave prominence to the narrative of each film. Colour was ancillary to the story and, paradoxically, could make the film ‘dulled’ for its audience. I was really interested in Yumibe’s paper as it provided a physiological angle to this aspect of film history. I’m intrigued by the links between visual sensationalism, bodily and sensory stimulation, and morality in this period, and Yumibe’s take on colour gave me a new angle to think about. It also reminds me of the gaudy yellow-back fictions of the 19C, and I wonder if this particular aspect of book history can be read alongside Yumibe’s claims of sensation and colour film history.

I think the highlight of this conference for me was the engaging keynote given by André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion. Even their PowerPoint slides were dazzling and made me wish I knew how to do more with that software than make bullet points appear gradually! Their talk called for a widening of critical attention into early cinema by developing the historiographical models which centre around 1900 and extending focus back to pre-cinematic devices and institutions of exhibition. They questioned why animation is often pushed to the periphery of cinema history, when this is fundamentally what cinema is. I’m sure the two speakers on animation history were delighted to hear this, but it also had a strong relevance for my own research. I am very wary of using the term ‘birth’ in relation to cinema, and have been adamant in my thinking on genealogies of media that early persistence of vision devices, such as the phenakistiscope through to the mutoscope, need to be registered in film history not just as precursor technologies of the kinematograph (the cinema) but as important devices in themselves. There was no rupture in technology which enabled the cinema to be born, and it follows that there was no new experience of viewing projected spectacles, just development and hybridity (see the conflation in the zoopraxinoscope, or Reynaud’s theatre optique). I will certainly look forward to new work by Gaudreault and Marion on their theory of ‘anima’: as key figures in this field, they are likely to lead a critical resurgence of interest in Victorian technologies and practices, and I look forward to responding to this development through my own research as it progresses.

Day two began early with Peter Walsh presenting a case history of the Sheffield Photographic Company and Andrew Shail depicting the terrain of emerging film celebrity in 1911. The following panel was more focused on film theory: Emmanuel Plasseraud considered Ricciotto Canudo’s notion of cinema as a ‘seventh art’ and put forward an interesting argument relating cinema to Wagnerian ideas of the gesamtkunstwerk (total artwork). Prior forms of the plastic arts were insufficient, Plasseraud stated, and contextualised the need for a total experience (to be found in the cinema) against the backdrop of crowd theory, hinting at his future work on telepathic reaction and uniformity of will in reactions to early cinema. This was followed by a reassessment of the scholarship of Andre Bazin by Marco Grosoli, who has been working on the 2600 articles by Bazin (94% of which have never been published!). He spoke specifically of the lack of teleology in Bazin’s film theory: true representation can never be achieved, yet cinema continues, thus repeating its failure. This urge towards recreation leads to a negation of time itself. Grosoli shows that for Bazin each technological advance is actually a step backwards as it reaffirms the infinite search for the mythic end point of total illusion. Cinema becomes a dog chasing its tail, and leads Bazin to refute any notion of cinema as a medium at all as it has ‘no specificity or identity’.

The last panel saw Malcolm Cook consider lightning cartoons, in which a short film sequence showed  the process of drawing an image which was then (often comically) animated as a special effect film sequence.

Cook made the interesting point that these formed a ‘narrative of perception’ as they brought motion to a static form and enacted visual perception. This is closely related to my own research on the physical act of creating visual illusion in persistence of vision devices, and offers another example of the reflexivity of early cinematic practices as against the hidden magic of trick photography.

Finally, Ian Christie’s keynote lecture considered the enthrallment of  film makers by ancient worlds (see the phenomenal popularity of Quo Vadis? for example). This talk illuminated the viewing history of one segment of early cinema, and saw Christie connect the popularity of this type of film to much earlier viewing experiences of the panorama. Huge sets and casts of hundreds allowed film makers to place the spectator in a position of visual awe as they once were in front of the gigantic panoramic exhibitions of the 19C, Christie argued.

Although no conclusions were reached (and would we have wanted them anyway?) by questioning 1911 as a year of cinema’s ‘second birth’ the event created a space in which a variety of multi-disciplinary  scholars could discuss previous models of film history and the paths which may be etched by future scholarship. The direction of film theory and historiography seems to be looking backwards to move forward, and I’m extremely happy to see this reassessment of 19C modes and models of cinematic form and technology. Any move away from a designated ‘birthplace’ will allow for interdisciplinary focus to be placed on emergence and convergence, and a strengthening of the field will only come from a loosening of its boundaries.

Posted by  |  July 5, 2011 | Categories: Conference report, Early cinema | Leave A Comment »

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