———- Forwarded message ———
From: Elizabeth Della Zazzera <edella@sas.upenn.edu>
Date: Mon, Feb 8, 2021 at 11:01 AM
Subject: [DHSI] 2/15 event: Allen Riddell with Dispatches from
Data-Intensive Book History
To: <institute@lists.uvic.ca>

Dear all,

I thought the below event, hosted by the Digital Humanities and Media
Studies Initiative at UConn’s Humanities Institute, might be of interest to
DHSIers. Details and registration link below.

Thanks!

All the best,
Elizabeth
—
Dr. Elizabeth Della Zazzera
Postdoctoral Research Associate
University of Connecticut Humanities Institute
edella@sas.upenn.edu
elizabethdz@uconn.edu

The Digital Humanities and Media Studies Initiative presents:Every
Victorian Novel: Dispatches from Data-Intensive Book HistoryAllen
Riddell *(Assistant
Professor of Information Science, Indiana University)*

*February 15, 2021, 4:00–5:15pm*

An online webinar. Registration is required for attendance
(https://www.eventbrite.com/e/dhms-allen-riddell-tickets-133106032727).

This talk reviews three recent contributions to the history of fiction
publishing in the British Isles and Ireland during the 19th century. The
three papers share an investment in an inclusive history of the novel and
of novel-writing as a profession. They depend on, to varying degrees, the
availability of machine-readable bibliographies and of digital surrogates
of volumes held by legal deposit libraries (e.g., Oxford’s Bodleian,
British Library).

The first article, “Reassembling the English Novel, 1789—1919
(https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.00382),” forthcoming in *Cultural Analytics*,
estimates annual rates of novel publication for each year between 1789 and
1919. This period—which witnessed the publication of between 40,000 and
63,000 previously-unpublished novels—merits attention because it was during
this period that institutions, organizational practices, and technologies
associated with the contemporary text industry emerged.

The second article, “The Class of 1838: A Social History of the First
Victorian Novelists
(https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/memoires/2020-v11-n2-memoires05373/1070272ar/),”
revisits a research question introduced by Raymond Williams in *The Long
Revolution* (1961) (Chapter 5, “The Social History of English Writers”).
This article, published last year, examines the social origins of the 81
novelists who published a novel in 1838. Replicating Williams’s research is
essential because Williams’s original study was, by his own admission,
preliminary and depended on a small, non-probability sample of writers.

The talk concludes with an assessment of four major digital libraries’
coverage of published Victorian novels. (The digital libraries studied are
the Internet Archive, HathiTrust, Google Books, and the British Library.)
While evidence suggests that a majority of Victorian novels have been
digitized, multivolume novels and novels by male authors are
overrepresented relative to their share of the population of published
novels. This third paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.00513) also provides
an occasion to reflect on the past decade of data-intensive literary
history, a research field whose prospects have been linked to mass
digitization of research and national libraries.

*Allen Riddell** is Assistant Professor of Information Science in the Luddy
School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University
Bloomington. His research explores applications of modern statistical
methods in literary history and text-based media studies. He is the
co-author with Folgert Karsdorp and Mike Kestemont of *Humanities Data
Analysis* (Princeton University Press, 2021) (open-access edition in 2022).
Prior to coming to Indiana, Riddell was a Neukom Fellow at the Neukom
Institute for Computational Sciences and the Leslie Center for the
Humanities at Dartmouth College.*

If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at
uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057.

———- Forwarded message ———
From: Elizabeth Della Zazzera <edella@sas.upenn.edu>
Date: Mon, Feb 8, 2021 at 11:01 AM
Subject: [DHSI] 2/15 event: Allen Riddell with Dispatches from
Data-Intensive Book History
To: <institute@lists.uvic.ca>

Dear all,

I thought the below event, hosted by the Digital Humanities and Media
Studies Initiative at UConn’s Humanities Institute, might be of interest to
DHSIers. Details and registration link below.

Thanks!

All the best,
Elizabeth
—
Dr. Elizabeth Della Zazzera
Postdoctoral Research Associate
University of Connecticut Humanities Institute
edella@sas.upenn.edu
elizabethdz@uconn.edu

The Digital Humanities and Media Studies Initiative presents:Every
Victorian Novel: Dispatches from Data-Intensive Book HistoryAllen
Riddell *(Assistant
Professor of Information Science, Indiana University)*

*February 15, 2021, 4:00–5:15pm*

An online webinar. Registration is required for attendance
(https://www.eventbrite.com/e/dhms-allen-riddell-tickets-133106032727).

This talk reviews three recent contributions to the history of fiction
publishing in the British Isles and Ireland during the 19th century. The
three papers share an investment in an inclusive history of the novel and
of novel-writing as a profession. They depend on, to varying degrees, the
availability of machine-readable bibliographies and of digital surrogates
of volumes held by legal deposit libraries (e.g., Oxford’s Bodleian,
British Library).

The first article, “Reassembling the English Novel, 1789—1919
(https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.00382),” forthcoming in *Cultural Analytics*,
estimates annual rates of novel publication for each year between 1789 and
1919. This period—which witnessed the publication of between 40,000 and
63,000 previously-unpublished novels—merits attention because it was during
this period that institutions, organizational practices, and technologies
associated with the contemporary text industry emerged.

The second article, “The Class of 1838: A Social History of the First
Victorian Novelists
(https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/memoires/2020-v11-n2-memoires05373/1070272ar/),”
revisits a research question introduced by Raymond Williams in *The Long
Revolution* (1961) (Chapter 5, “The Social History of English Writers”).
This article, published last year, examines the social origins of the 81
novelists who published a novel in 1838. Replicating Williams’s research is
essential because Williams’s original study was, by his own admission,
preliminary and depended on a small, non-probability sample of writers.

The talk concludes with an assessment of four major digital libraries’
coverage of published Victorian novels. (The digital libraries studied are
the Internet Archive, HathiTrust, Google Books, and the British Library.)
While evidence suggests that a majority of Victorian novels have been
digitized, multivolume novels and novels by male authors are
overrepresented relative to their share of the population of published
novels. This third paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.00513) also provides
an occasion to reflect on the past decade of data-intensive literary
history, a research field whose prospects have been linked to mass
digitization of research and national libraries.

*Allen Riddell** is Assistant Professor of Information Science in the Luddy
School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University
Bloomington. His research explores applications of modern statistical
methods in literary history and text-based media studies. He is the
co-author with Folgert Karsdorp and Mike Kestemont of *Humanities Data
Analysis* (Princeton University Press, 2021) (open-access edition in 2022).
Prior to coming to Indiana, Riddell was a Neukom Fellow at the Neukom
Institute for Computational Sciences and the Leslie Center for the
Humanities at Dartmouth College.*

If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at
uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057.