2nd Post, Week 4

I really liked the readings of this week and I have to admit that they were the most enjoyable read so far. I mean, James Musslle’s argumentation was laid out very nicely and it seemed to me as the type of argument that sets a goal and goes on to actually achieve it. In addition, the websites we examined were by far the most interesting websites so far. Of course, not to undermine the library websites of last week, but Gale websites were different in terms of we were able to see the advertising brochures of those databases and we were able to observe what they were selling and how they were selling it as well as we dug a little bit behind the scenes, especially with the featured video. All in all, this week’s readings had a positive impact on my understanding of the course so far.

Musslle opens his introduction with an intriguing statement, which claims that the purpose of his book is to illustrate how the digitization of the past has “transform[ed]” our understanding of the past. Few lines later, he states: “'This book argues that the digitization of the press provides an opportunity to reimagine what we know about the nineteenth century” (1). As I kept reading, I had this claim present in my mind all the time and I simply looked for answers that would satisfy me, the reader/user. We obviously did not read the whole book, and so I was trying to be extra cautious with what we read. As a result, I found few places in what we read that perhaps can function as answers to Musslle’s initial claim.

It is no secret that the 19^th century Victorian readers were very aquatinted with journalism. In this regard, Musslle points out, as he does in many other places, to Bennett’s  notion of “journalizing society,” which emphasizes that the 19^th century Victorian society was a society that lived on journalism as a way of carrying words; therefore, "There was no panoptic position from which nineteen-century readers could survey varied products of the press as they appeared at different intervals from location around the country” (2). Simply put, it was inaccessible for the 19^th century Victorian reader to access all that was produced in the 19^th century Victorian society. Therefore, there seems an overall lack of context for the 19^th century readers, which can perhaps become constructed through digitalization. On the other hand, this idea of an overall lack of context is kind of slippery because it works both ways. This means that the present-day reader may also experience the same lack of context. On this issue, Musslle explains:

The nineteenth-century presses might now be silent, but what survives is incomplete. We not only lack the details of those who produced and contributed to the press, but also the shared cultural resources that come from being a contemporary. Without these, we struggle to realize the meanings and effects such texts had for their readers: the pleasure of reading, the surprise or shock of their appearance, the nuances of description, the familiarity or novelty of what was under discussion, or glancing references and allusions. (3)

However, this issue perhaps can be resolved through the fact that the digitizing process actually involves an editorializing process. The editorial attempts almost always involve choices and interpretations that is based upon modeling. Those choices construct a context of the past that is based on having everything available in hand, and that can be only done through digitization. Musslle relates this idea to The Research Society For Victorian Periodical and to the Victorian Research Database, which gathered all that has been published. In this context, the use of OCR (the optical character recognition) made it possible to reconstruct the context of the past through the inside search of all of the documentations and linking it to other works. This conclusion, I think, answers Musslle’s initial claim about how digitization “transform[s]” our perception of the past.

Another possible answer to Musslle claim is perhaps found in the discussion of the physical book vs. the virtual (digital) book and the reader vs. the user. Musslle differentiates between the physical book and the digital book as a means to carry the text. He illustrates that the physical book is a stable physical binding of the text, which traps it to a limited space, whereas the digital book is a dynamic virtual binding of the text, which enables endless expansion of knowledge through embedded links and the ability “to encode and instantiate text” (7). Within the reader vs. the user discussion, Musslle argues that our encounter with the past through digitization makes us users, “We are already users, whether we admit it or not” (17). The reader, according to Musslle, is somehow passive, but the user is dynamic in the sense that the latter is able to have a better control over the text to reconstruct its context: "As digital information is processable these resources necessarily exert control over their contents, providing indices that can be searched and browsed" (22). At the end, Musslle goes back to reassert his initial claim: “The digitization of large tracts of the nineteenth-century press has transformed the terms upon which we discover material and attempt to recover its meaning….Whereas it was possible to continue to ignore the press while it was arranged in forbidding bound volumes in fragmented runs around the world, now it is searchable from any device with a decent Internet connection” (28-29).