rise of periodical studies_scholes & latham.pdf

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the changing profession

The Rise ofPeriodical Studies

SEAN LATHAM is associate professor

of English at the University of Tulsa,

where he serves as editor of theJames

Joyce Quarterlyand codirector (with

Robert Scholes) of the Modernist Jour-nals Project. The author ofAm I a Snob?

Modernism and the Novel (Cornell UP,

2003), he is completing a new book, The

Art of Scandal: The Open Secrets and Il-

licit Pleasures of the Modern Novel. He

is a member of the MLAs Task Force on

Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and

Promotion and a trustee of the Interna-

tional James Joyce Foundation.

ROBERT SCHOLES, Andrew W. Mellon

Professor of Humanities Emeritus andresearch professor of modern culture

and media at Brown University, was

president of the MLA in 2004. His most

recent book is Paradoxy of Modernism

(Yale UP, 2006), and his major current

projects are a second edition of The

Nature of Narrative(Oxford UP) and a

digital edition of Blast(191415) for the

Modernist Journals Project.

The Emergence of Periodical Studies as a Field

WITHIN OR ALONGSIDE THE LARGER FIELD OF PRINT CULTURE, A NEW

AREA FOR SCHOLARSHIP IS EMERGING IN THE HUMANITIES AND THE

more humanistic social sciences: periodical studies. Tis develop-ment is being driven by the cultural turn in departments o language

and literature, by the development o digital archives that allow or

such studies on a broader scale than ever beore, and by what the pro-

ducers o the Spectator Project have called the special capabilities o

the digital environment (Center). Literary and historical disciplines

engaged with the study o modern culture are finding in periodicals

both a new resource and a pressing challenge to existing paradigms

or the investigation o Enlightenment, nineteenth-century, and

modern cultures. Te orms o this new engagement range rom Cary

Nelsons suggestion, in Repression and Recovery, that periodicalsshould be read as texts that have a unity different rom but compara-

ble with that o individual books (219) to the organization o groups

like the Research Society or Victorian Periodicals, ounded in 1968,

and the more recently established Research Society or American Pe-

riodicals. Every year new books are appearing that emphasize peri-

odicals and investigate the ways in which modern literature and the

arts are connected to the culture o commerce and advertising and to

the social, political, and scientific issues o the time.

Tis still-emergent field is particularly distinguished by its in-

sistence on interdisciplinary scholarship as well as its aggressive useo digital media. Periodicals ofen range broadly across subjects: asingle issue o, say, ime, Vogue, or Punchcan include everythingrom economic theory and political opinion to light verse and the-ater reviews. While individual scholars or students might be able tomine these sources or a narrow range o materials relating to theirfields, they are rarely in a position to say much about the periodicalas a whole. As a consequence, we have ofen been too quick to seemagazines merely as containers o discrete bits o inormation rather

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than autonomous objects o study. Te rapidexpansion o new media technologies over the

last two decades, however, has begun to trans-

orm the way we view, handle, and gain access

to these objects. Tis immediacy, in turn, re-veals these objects to us anew, so that we have

begun to see them not as resources to be dis-aggregated into their individual componentsbut as texts requiring new methodologies and

new types o collaborative investigation.Signs o this emerging ield are widely

visible. In recent years, or example , the

Greenwood Press has launched a series o

historical guides to the worlds periodicals

and newspapers that includes our volumesdevoted to British literary magazines, one or

the eighteenth century, two or the nineteenth

and early twentieth centuries, and one or the

period 191484. More recently, afer a dozen

years o publication,American Periodicals: A

Journal of History, Criticism, and Bibliography

has moved rom a minor press to the Ohio

State University Press, with digital publicationthrough Project Muse, at Johns Hopkins. Be-

yond that, various efforts to make newspapers

and periodicals available in digital orm areunder way, including Tomson Gales digital

archive o the London imes, 17851985; Pro-

Quests archive o the New York imesrom

its ounding, in 1851, to the present; the Mod-

ernist Journals Project, o Brown University

and the University o ulsa; the University

o Michigans JSOR; and Cornell s Making

o America; as well as the National DigitalNewspaper Program, o the National Endow-

ment or the Humanities. And now ProQuestis proposing to enhance the research potential

o this field enormously:

ProQuest Inormation and Learning willdigitize nearly 6 million pages o British pe-riodicals rom the seventeenth, eighteenth,nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,creating direct access or humanities schol-ars to the breadth o texts that captured both

daily lie and landmark thought o the time.

Upon its release in early 2006, the archive,

entitled British Periodicals, will encompass160 periodicals, building to nearly 500 within

two years.

aken together, these initiatives mean thatan important scholarly ield, which couldnot be developed because no one had accessto all the resources necessary to organize itsstudy, is now near the point at which scholars

around the world will be able to participatein its growth.

Te wealth o topics covered in periodi-cals is such that their study requires interdis-

ciplinary cooperation, as exemplified in theollowing description o a recent project ogreat interest:

Te Science in the Nineteenth-Century Pe-

riodical (SciPer) project is jointly organised by

the Centre or Nineteenth-Century Studies in

the Department o English Literature at the

University o Sheffield and the Division o His-

tory and Philosophy o Science in the School

o Philosophy at the University o Leeds. . . .

he aim o the project is to identiy andanalyse the representation o science, tech-

nology and medicine, as well as the inter-penetration o science and literature, in thegeneral periodical press in Britain between1800 and 1900. Employing a highly interdis-ciplinary approach, it addresses not only thereception o scientiic ideas in the generalpress, but also examines the creation o non-specialist orms o scientific discourse within

a periodical ormat, and the ways in whichthey interact with t he miscellany o otherkinds o articles ound in nineteenth-century

periodicals. (opham)

It is especially significant that this study o the

historical dissemination o scientific ideas isbased in a humanities research institute andthat it ocuses on the ways that the periodi-cal ormat generates new orms o scientificdiscourse aimed at a nonspecialist audienceand influenced by the other material in theperiodicals in which they appear. Such peri-

odicals are ideal sites or studies o the rise o

The Rise of Periodical Studies [ P M L A

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an intellectual public sphere in which manykinds o literacy were encouraged or enabled.

he SciPer project, however, is conined toone field, science, and one century, the nine-

teenth, thus representing only a portion othe potential field o periodical studies.

Te resources needed to conduct schol-arship and teaching in periodical studies arecoming into being with astonishing rapidity.New digital archives are springing up every-where. Consider, or example, the ollowingexcerpt rom the Spectator Project, at Rut-gers, started in 2000:

Te Spectator Project is an interactive hyper-media environment or the study o Te atler

(17091711), Te Spectator(171114), and the

eighteenth-century periodical in general. Te

most innovative eature o the project devel-

oped out o the object o study itsel. Te or-

mat, style, and even the content o Te atler

and the Spectator were immediately and

closely imitated in hundreds o periodicals

in Europe and the Americas. Te Spectator

Project will a llow users to compare imitated

and imitating ormats and passages o text

through the means o hyperlinks. . . . While

many scholarly web projects simply make

their material more widely availablein it-

sel, a laudable goalthis eature makes our

project an interpretiveeditorial apparatus,

and one which is based on the special capa-

bilities o the digital environment. (Center)

Periodical studies are by no means confinedto Europe and America. In South Arica, or

example, DISA (Digital Imaging South A-rica) is doing excellent work:

he title o DISA 1 is Southern Aricas

Struggle or Democracy: Anti Apartheid

Periodicals, 19601994. DISA has brought

together online, journals scattered in collec-

tions around the country, and it has earned

the respect o researchers locally and interna-

tionally. Approximately orty periodical titles

have been selected rom a very comprehensive

list, with a view to presenting not only a wide

spectrum o political views published during

these years, but also relecting lie in South

Arica during that time, in a diversity o areas

such as trade unions, religion, health, culture

and gender. Publications reflecting both blackand white viewpoints were included, and an

attempt has been made to represent distinc-

tive regional variations. DISA 1 contains ap-

proximately 55 000 pages o ully searchable

text rom 40 journal titles, bringing together

or the first time a careully selected resource

on the socio-political history o South Arica

during this period. (Digital Imaging Project)

Te diversity o these resources reveals

that one o the key elements or the creationo periodical studies is already alling intoplace: the assembly and dissemination o acore set o objects. Now that they are readilyaccessible, we are prepared to begin work on a

second essential element or this field: the cre-

ation o typological descriptions and scholarly

methodologies. Tis will be a collaborative e-

ort that takes place in an evolving set o con-

versations and debates across, within, andbetween the traditional disciplines. Periodi-

cal studies began in this country with FrankLuther Motts series o books on Americanmagazines, which won a Pulitzer Prize in1939. Mott was a proessor o journalism, and

large-circulation magazines and newspapersremained objects o attention in journalismschools, while departments o language andliterature mainly confined themselves to theworks defined as little magazines by Fred-erick Hoffman, Charles Allen, and Carolyn

Ulrichs ground-breaking study (1947).Te rise o cultural studies enables us to

see this distinction as artificial, since high lit-

erature, art, and advertising have mingled inperiodicals rom their earliest years, and ma-

jor authors have been published in magazines

both little and big. Now, as digital archivesbecome increasingly available, we must con-tinue to insist on the autonomy and distinc-tiveness o periodicals as cultural objects (as

opposed to literary or journalistic ones)

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while attempting to develop the languageand tools necessary to examine, describe, and

contextualize them. In his speech launchingthe National Digital Newspaper Program, the

chair o the National Endowment or the Hu-manities, Bruce Cole, quoted Philip Grahams

remark that newspapers are the first roughdraf o history. Tis is true enough, but inother periodicals the changes over time thatwe call history can be seen in all their com-plexity, including developments in literatureand the arts as well as social and politicalevents and processes. Periodical studiesnames

this emerging field, which has both ocus and

breadth and cuts across accepted fields andstructures in a precise and reasoned mannerthat enables a range o activities, rom under-

graduate learning to advanced research.

Advertising and the Hole in the Archive

Te emergence o this field depends on archi-

val resources and, in particular, on the digi-tization o archival holdings o periodicalsrom the seventeenth century to the present.Unortunately, however, as those o us making

digital editions o periodicals are discovering,

the print archive we thought was there is ac-tually, in many cases, not. Or, rather, there isa hole in the archive. In England, rom thebeginning o the rise o periodicals, with theatler and theSpectator, there were advertise-

ments in the individual issues o magazines.But versions o the magazines in book ormregularly dropped the advertising as ephem-

eral, keeping only the literary pages or pos-terity. And this practice has been ollowed, in

one way or another, ever since.

Recently, or example, we investigated

the possibility o a digital edition o Scrib-

ners Magazineand ound that librarians who

believed they had substantial or complete

runs o the journal actually had bound cop-

ies rom which most o the advertising had

been stripped. ypically, an issue o Scribners

might have more than 70 pages o advertising

at the beginning, with their own numbering,

and another 70 or so at the end, continuing

those numbers. In the middle would be about

150 main pages, numbered consecutively

through a set o issues until a volume wascomplete. When the books were bound, the

advertising pages were discarded, except or a

ew in the back part o the issue that had some

text embedded. Te advertising pages were not

missed, because the page numbers o the vol-

ume were all there. Few original issues o the

journal have been preserved in their entirety,

even though the catalogs say otherwise.

Similarly,McClures Magazineor Sep-

tember 1898 (vol. 11, no. 5) has nearly a hun-dred pages o advertising, numbered rom 1 to

16 in the ront and rom 17 to 92 in the back.

All our cover pages are unnumbered. he

text or that issue is numbered rom 401 to

496. Roughly the same amount o pages was

devoted to text and ads, as in other, similar

periodicals. Te advertising pages, numbered

or discarding, were regularly tossed out when

the issues were bound in volume orm. Until

some practical investigating is done at a lot o

libraries, we wont know just how wide anddeep the hole in the archive is, but we have

plenty o evidence already to suggest that it is

real and important. Te culture o the past is

alive in those advertising pagesas alive as in

the texts they surround. It is time, then, or li-

braries to find out exactly what they have and

to correct their catalogs to reflect this. And

it is also vital that those who digitize these

precious resources give us the ull texts, with

the advertising included, because the culturalinormation in those pages is o considerable

importanceand it is not available anywhere

else. Tere are examples o good digital prac-

tice out there. Te edition by JSOR o Roger

Frys Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs,

or example, provides all the advertising pages

as ront and back matter. Tis is the standard

to which other digitizers should aspire.

Periodical studies can be seen as a sub-

field o print culturean especially impor-


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tant and lively subfield. And advertising is avital, even crucial, part o it. Te archival de-cision to excise the commercial matter romthese documents arises rom a undamental

misunderstanding o periodicals as uniquecultural and material objects. We continuetoo ofen to see them essentially as aggrega-tions o otherwise autonomous works, simi-lar to literary anthologies, whichas LeahPrice argueshave themselves been treatedas mere containers or other print objects.As a result, archivists, editors, and scholarsalike have reely disaggregated periodicals,separating their contents rom what Jerome

McGann calls their bibliographic code (57).In some cases, this has understandably been a

product precisely o the need to anthologize

to provide structure and meaning to the com-

plexity o the past. hus, the wide-rangingwritings o, say, Ezra Pound or VirginiaWool are stripped rom their original loca-tions in magazines, reviews, and newspapersto be more widely disseminated in books and

readers. In other casesas in the removal othe advertisements, covers, and paper wrap-

persthis has been the consequence o a dis-tinctly modern bias against the commercialaspects o aesthetic production. Te creationo digital archival resources, however, bothalleviates the need or critical anthologies and

creates the opportunity to begin reconstruct-

ing the hole in our print archives.

A recent editorial in the New York imeshad this to say about the new complete digital

edition o the New Yorker:

But the most visceral pleasure in these discscomes rom the advertising. It is so interest-ing that you can be orgiven or conusingthe real relation between advertising andeditorial content, or supposing that oceano warm, gray ink existed just to supportthose astonishing ads. Who rememberedthat Exxon made an intelligent typewriter?

Why should an ad or laser discs eel so cru-elly ancient, more ancient than an adAsk

the man who owns oneor the Golden An-

niversary Packard? Tere is quicksand here,and some o us are sinking ast. (Annals)

Modern culture was created rom a still-

obscure alchemy o commercial and aestheticimpulses and processes. And this mixture was

most visible in magazines, as in the claims

made in the advertising section o Scribners

or November 1912 about the cleverness,

inventiveness, and alluring effectiveness o

the advertising copy in the magazine (fig. 1).

Te shif, at the turn o the nineteenth century,

rom periodicals supported by circulation to

periodicals supported by advertising was cru-

cial or modern culture, as the New Yorkerso

richly illustrates. I we really wish to know the

past and not just a ew monuments preserved

rom it, we must study the way that art and

commodity culture influenced each other or

the past three centuries and more. And this

means exploring more ully and more in-

tensely the ascinating world o periodicals.

Digital Archiving

Te recently announced plans o the Internetsearch company Google to digitize major re-search libraries should give us pause, because

digital archiving is being done in many wayswith degrees o useulness and reliabilitythat vary enormously rom instance to in-stance. Te pioneering project called Making

o America, at Cornell University, includes adigital reproduction o Scribners Magazinerom 1887 to 1896but this reproduction

excludes advertising. hat is one problem.Another has to do with searching. Te use-ulness o a digital archive depends heavilyon our ability to find things in it. Indeed, asthese digital archives continue to grow insize and complexity, the need or innovativeand nuanced modes o searching becomesincreasingly acute. Te ability to search ac-curately and efficiently, in turn, depends ontwo things: (1) the tagging o texts so that

such metadata as genre, author, and title can


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be extracted rom them and (2) our ability tosearch texts or particular words or names. A

typical digital archive o a periodical presents

us with a picture o the original text, along

with a searchable version that is invisible.his searchable version is normally madeby optical character recognition (OCR), anautomatic process that produces an editabletext rom the image o a printed page. OCRhas varying degrees o reliability, depend-ing mainly on the distinctness o the original

printing. We have ound that some pages oolder periodicals emerge rom the OCR op-eration with hundreds o errors, which need

to be hand-correcteda labor-intensive andthereore costly process. In many digital ar-chives, however, the automatic result remains

uncorrected. It is all the text we have, and the

only thing that can be searched.

homson Gales digital archive o the

London imes is very useul, to be sure, but

the user must be wary o its search capability.

For example, i you perorm a text search or

the name Ezra Pound in the entire year 1914,

you will get three hits, including his name in

some advertisements, but you will not getthe imes review o the first issue o Blast, in

which his ull name appears. A text search or

pound will yield many hits, including some

or Ezra, but not the Blastreview. And this is

an excellent archive. No doubt others are less

reliable. Moreover, when the imes search

returns a hit, the word is highlighted on the

page, something that even JSOR, which is the

gold standard in these matters, does not do.

For tagged metadata, everything dependson the categories that are tagged. Without go-

ing into excessive detail here, we can pointto Guidelines or Best Encoding Practices,o the Digital Library Federation, which de-scribes our levels o encoding, rom themost basic to the most complex (Friedlandet al.). Most periodical archives operate atsomething like the DLFs Level 2 encoding,

which is described as suitable or projects

with these traits:

a large volume o material is to be made avail-

able online quickly

a digital image o each page is desired

the material is o interest to a large commu-

nity o users who wish to read texts that allowkeyword searching

rudimentary search and display capabilitiesbased on the large structures o the text aredesired

each text will be checked to ensure that divi-sions and headers are properly identified

extensibil ity is desired; that is, one desires tokeep open the option or a higher level o tag-

ging to be added at a later date

But some, including the Modernist JournalsProject (o which we are the directors) and the

Tomson Gale and JSOR periodical archives,

go beyond keyword searching and allow ull

searching o the texts. Much depends on the

accuracy and completeness o such searches.

Te special problems o periodical adver-

tising have scarcely been addressed by the the-

oreticians o metadata. Are ads text or image?

Are they content or just ront and back mat-

ter? Do they matter at all? We are arguing that

they matter a great deal in the study o peri-odicals and the modern culture that has been

enacted in periodicals or more than three

centuries. o that end, we offer some guide-

lines or the digital archiving o periodicals:

Start with the original issues.

Present images o all pages rom cover tocover.Generate metadata or advertisements along

with other eatures.

Include the verbal parts o advertising astext or searching to the extent that typog-raphy allows.

On the visible pages, highlight hits insearches.

Te main principle here is that users shouldbe given clear inormation about the level oaccuracy they can expect, along with adviceabout searching strategies that will mitigate

deficiencies and with cautions about the con-


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clusions they may drawespecially negativeconclusions based on not finding a word ora name, which may simply have eluded theOCR machine.

As our previous comments imply, webelieve there is room in digital periodical ar-

chives or mass projects, and or specialized

projects that come with higher levels o prep-

aration, along with editorial apparatus that

makes their objects more valuable or those

who use them, which may include scholars,

teachers, students, and interested members o

the public. Tese more specialized archives, in

act, are now best described as thematic re-

search collections, since they may include thekinds o introductions, notes, and links added

to the images o an original periodical that

we have provided in our edition o the New

Age(London, 190722). Tis collection alone,

or example, contains over a thousand artist

pages, each including basic biographical inor-

mation and links to images o typical works by

that artist in our archive. Above all, the digital

archiving o periodicals should seek to fill the

hole in the printed archive, through which so

much valuable cultural material has been lost.Tat is, digital archivists and editors should

locate original copies o the periodicals they

edit and not simply work rom bound cop-

ies (which regularly exclude advertising) or

reprints o those originals. We will close this

section, then, with a brie illustration o what

this might mean or periodical studies.

Te Spectator Project is an enormouslyuseul work o scholarship, which we do not

wish to denigrate, but we can use it to showthe difference between a digital edition o aperiodical made rom a book version and one

made rom the original pages. Tis digital ar-

chive is based on a book version o theSpec-tator, published in 1891, but it also includesimages o the original pages o certain issues,

beginning with 75. We compare here the lastpage o the 1891 reprint o issue 75 (ig. 2)with the back page o the original broadside

edition o the same issue (fig. 3).

Tis issue was written by Richard Steele,and his text occupies all o the first page andone o the two columns on the second pageo this broadside. Te rest o the second page

is taken up by a section called -. Tese, we should note, are in addi-tion to some text devoted to advertising theSpectatoritsel, telling people where theymight purchase it, or example, and whereAdvertisements are taken in. As the NewYork imeseditorial observed o the NewYorker, the advertisements in this issuethreaten to eclipse the text in interest or themodern reader. Tere are six o them, which,

taken together, open a remarkable window onthe culture o London in the reign o QueenAnne. Since they are not easy to read in thisormat, we will summarize them briefly, inthe order in which they appear.

he irst is or John Crownes play Sir

Courtly Nice; or, It Cannot Be, perormed by

Her Majestys Company o Comedians at the

Teatre Royal, in Drury Lane. It stars Colley

Cibber in the title role and includes char-

acters named Surly, Hothead, and Crack.Copies are available rom the printer, Jacob

onson at Shakespears Head over-against

Catherine-street in the Strand.

Te second is or an Entertainment o Mu-

sick, consisting o a Poem, called, Te Pas-

sion o Sappho, Written by Mr. Harison,

and Te Feast o Alexander, Written by Mr.

Dryden; as they are Set to Musick by Mr.

Tomas Clayton (Author o Arsinoe). Tis

comes with instructions about where ticketscan be obtained, at a price o five shillings.

Te third is or a work being printed by on-

son [w]ith Her Majestys Royal Privilegeand Licence. Tis work is a description othe Palace o Blenheim, in Oxordshire, inlarge olio ormat, with plans, sections, and

perspectives.

he ourth, and by ar the longest o theads, is or another book, to be published

in a ew days by John Wyat, at the Rose, in


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Saint Pauls Churchyard: Te Lie and Acts

o Mathew Parker, the First Archbishop oCanterbury in the Reign o Queen Eliza-beth. Tis ad runs to nearly thirty lines,

summarizing the contents o the book,which include [a]n Appendix, containing

various ranscripts o Records, Letters, In-

struments, Ordinances, Commissions, Dis-

courses, Relations, Intelligences, and othersecret Papers, above an Hundred in Num-ber. We are not sure what all those thingsarebut we want that book.

Te fifh ad is or Choice Good New White

and Red Wines, never in the Hands o

any but the Importers. Te details are as-cinating or those interested in wine, andthe ad concludes with the ollowing offer:Any Gentlemen that please may come andtaste the Wines will be welcome, whetherhe buys or not.

And the sixth is perhaps the most asci-nating o all. It is or [a]n Incomparablepleasant incture to restore the Sense oSmelling, tho lost or many Years. A ew

Drops o which, being snuffd up the Nose,inallibly Cures those who have lost theirSmell, let it proceed rom what Cause so-ever. Tis miracle brew is offered or saleat Mr. Paynes oyshop at the Angel andCrown in St. Pauls Church Yard nearCheapside with Directions. Te loss o this

sense is a recognized ailment in our time(anosmia), but it is tempting to concluderom this advertisement that the era osnuff taking generated an unusual demandor the restoration o the sense o smell.

In the other column o this inal page,Steele philosophizes about the relation be-tween virtue and gentility or agreeable-ness. hose elegant abstractions show usthe Enlightenment mind at work, and it isan interesting mind, to be sure, but the ad-

vertisements open a window on the body,the things that body ingests and the peror-

mances that entertain it, whether theatrical

or musical. Tey also reveal a new interest inarchitecture and archives mixed with a sorto gossipy desire or secret inormation. Col-ley Cibber, whom most o us know as a name

in Te Dunciador as the author o a personalmemoir, is now live at Drury Lane, and JohnDryden, though dead, has been set to music,which is being perormed at the composershouse. We are invited to go to the Strandor Saint Pauls Churchyard to buy the planso Blenheim Palace or the secret papers oQueen Elizabeths archbishop, or to partakeo a ree wine tasting at the Black Lyon, not to

mention the restoration o a vital sense by a

ew drops o an Incomparable pleasant inc-ture. Queen Annes England is here, and weare invited to enter it through this preciousdoor, which periodical studies can open orusi this material is archived properly.

Collaboration

Such advertisements and the ascinatingintertextual connections they orge withinand beyond the columns o the Spectator

also serve as a necessary reminder that pe-riodicals are rich, dialogic texts. Magazinesand newspapers, in particular, create otensurprising and even bewildering points ocontact between disparate areas o humanactivity, including (in this one example) thetheater, the wine cellar, architecture, and themarketplace. o be as diverse as the objects it

examines, thereore, periodical studies should

be constructed as a collaborative scholarly

enterprise that cannot be conined to onescholar or even a single discipline. Te recent

digital edition o the New Yorker, or exam-ple, contains a wealth o inormation that can

certainly be parsed among relatively narrowinterests. Slicing the magazine up in this way,

however, ails to recognize its coherence asa cultural object. While this may acilitatecertain kinds o scholarly research, it sup-presses the act that editors worked careully

to solicit, craf, and organize the material as


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part o an autonomous print object. Similarly,

it tends to blind us to the ways in which in-dividual contributors may have seen them-selves as part o a larger enterprise, choosing

to contribute to theNew Yorkerrather than,say,McCluresor Harpers Weekly.

Anyone who studies periodicals soondiscovers that they are requently in dia-logue with one another. Te first issue o theNew Yorker, or example, in February 1925,opened with commentary on two o WilliamRandolph Hearsts publications, Cosmopoli-tanand International, including a reprint oa recent table o contents or International,

mockingly described as the plot o Americasgreat novel (O All hings). Periodicalsthus create and occupy typically complex and

ofen unstable positions in sometimes collab-

orative and sometimes competitive culturalnetworks. Uncovering these sorts o connec-tionswhich are inevitably lost in the pro-cess o anthologizationadds new layers odensity both to magazines themselves and tothe work o individual contributors. As Judith

Yarros Lee has recently argued, we must be-gin to realize that periodicals differ substan-tially rom other publications and that thesedifferences call or new approaches to publi-cations history and criticismapproachesdistinct rom operations conducted as liter-ary criticism or journalism history (197).Tis means that to address periodicals as ty-pologically distinct and historically coherentobjects, we may have to develop new scholarly

methodologies adequate to the task.

his work can best be perormed in agenuinely interdisciplinary or even multi-

disciplinary context capable o encouraging

and integrating new kinds o research. Such

collaborative efforts are essential not only be-

cause they can bring the necessarily diverse

set o competencies to bear on the objects o

study themselves but also because we oten

find ourselves conronting vast and unwieldy

archives. A good deal o work in the field, in

act, has ocused on small magazines with

short print runs or on single themes or mo-

tis in larger periodicals. Such a narrow ocus

arises, in part, rom the sheer size o the peri-

odical archive. A single scholar working with

print editions, microfilm, and even digital ar-chives, afer all, has only a finite amount o

time and energy. Tus, while it may be pos-

sible to examine, say, images o Europe in

two nineteenth-century Australian il lustrated

magazines (Webby), it would be almost im-

possible or a single scholar to examine so

broad a theme in a daily newspaper o the pe-

riod. Digital technologies can aid us in sorting

through such material, but they nevertheless

do not enable an individual to gain the kindo clear and comprehensive vision o it that we

now have o the atleror the Little Review.

he continuing emergence o periodical

studies as a field thereore invites us to think

in new and creative ways about the unique na-

ture o this scholarly enterprise. We will have

to begin by creating what Andrea L. Broom-

field, in a recent introduction to a special edi-

tion o Victorian Periodicals Review, calls vital

connections among persons who organizethemselves with the purpose o solving prob-

lems, communicating ideas across disciplin-

ary boundaries, and ormally collaborating to

produce scholarship and also to impart knowl-

edge (136). While this kind o rhetoric is excit-

ing, it describes a practice that remains rare in

the humanities, where tenure and promotion

decisions ofen hang on individually authored

projects and the dominant model o scholar-

ship continues to circle around the single-

author monograph. Periodicals, however, are

by their nature collaborative objects, assem-

bled in complex interactions between editors,

authors, advertisers, sales agents, and even

readers. Te table o contents or the February

1932 issue o Scribners Magazine, or example,

illustrates how diverse and wide-ranging these

objects can be. Tis issue includes

Her Son, a complete short novel by Edith

Wharton, which appears here as the winner


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o a five-thousand-dollar prize sponsored

by the magazine.

Who Knows Justice?, an essay by Clarence

Darrow, in which he argues that the great

movements o the race have not been born ojustice, but o the deep, controlling emotions

that are inherent in the human structure.

A short essay, Te Ethics o the MachineAge, by the Boston department store ty-coon Edward A. Filene, which links massproduction to Christian ethics.

American Paintersthe Snob Spirit, bythe well-known art critic Tomas Craven.He argues here, as he did throughout his

career, that American painting would bemore original and thus better served i it lay

in the hands o a ew nameless illustratorsworking or the old Police Gazettethan anarmy o imitators o Matisse and Picasso.

Old Billy Hell, an installment in an ongo-

ing series o lie narratives entitled Lie inthe United States.

Finally, almost one hundred pages o adver-

tisements. One or the American elephone

and elegraph Company urges readers to buystock in the company, noting that nearly

hal o the shareholders are women and one

out o five is a telephone employee.

hat a single issue o this magazine oerssomething o interest to researchers in a wide

array o disciplines, including art, literature,law, history, and sociology, suggests how lim-

iting a traditional disciplinary rame mightbe. I we really wish to understand magazines

in all their complexity and specificity, there-ore, periodical studies will have to synthesize

these scattered areas o interest into collab-orative scholarly networks built around these

objects. Such a collective effort can providethe diversity o expertise needed to describethe richness o periodical culture and to gen-erate more eective critical and historicaltools or analyzing its riches.

o develop such research models, we

might look proitably to the sciences, where

laboratories are ofen structured around pre-

cisely this kind o intellectual challenge. In

such settings, large experiments are broken

down into component parts, and particular

sets o skills and expertise are brought to bearon them. Te final product is then eventually

integrated and published either in whole or in

logical parts. Articles in the sciences are al-

most always written not by single individuals

but by collaborators who help in varying ways

to execute the project. In applying this model

to periodical studies, we might thereore con-

sider the creation o humanities labs: similarly

collaborative networks o researchers and in-

stitutions that lend their collective expertiseto textual objects that would otherwise over-

whelm single scholars. At the moment, much

o the research on periodicals remains concen-

trated either in the hands o individuals or in

scholarly societies and organizations, such as

the Research Society or Victorian Periodicals.

hese societies and organizations, however,

do not quite rise to the level o collaborative

laboratories but instead provide sites where

researchers can share and disseminate theirwork. For periodical studies to activate its po-

tential ully, thereore, we will need dedicated

institutional sites that urnish the necessary

material archives as well as the diverse exper-

tise these rich materials require. Te expand-

ing digital repositories, which ofen patch up

gaping holes in the print archive, have begun

to provide a broad array o scholars with a daz-

zling spectrum o periodicals. Tis dissemina-

tion o the archive, in turn, now challenges us

to invent the tools and institutional structures

necessary to engage the diversity, complexity,

and coherence o modern periodical culture.

NOTES

1. In Te Anthology and the Rise of the Novel: From

Richardson to George Eliot, Price argues that the an-

thology must be approached as a genre in its own right


the

changing

profession


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rather than as a container or others. Like periodicals,

these objects too provide a vehicle or literary history

but have rarely become its object (3). Prices analy-

sis thus provides a useul model or periodical studies,

though the diversity and complexity o magazines and

newspapers reach well beyond the somewhat narrow con-straints o literary history.

2. For a description o one such mode o hybrid read-

ing in the digital archive, see Latham.

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Broomfield, Andrea L. Interdisciplinary Work and Pe-

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