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CLLC Victorian Periodical Corpus

 

Some Statistics: as at February 2008

Background of Corpus

Some years ago Dr. Ellen Jordan – a social historian with a special interest in the Victorian era – came to the CLLC with an attribution problem. She was interested to know if the computational stylistics techniques being developed at the Centre could determine the probability of correctness of her "strong hunch" that Anne Mozley had written a number of anonymous articles of interest to her. She was told that she would need to build up a corpus of well attributed articles by comparable authors – similar in date and genre to her "mystery" articles. Ellen decided that she would choose articles written by well regarded female journalists in "high class" literary journals around the 1850s and 60s.

 

Thus, the corpus began to take shape. The first articles were transcribed from photocopies Ellen had taken from the periodical Journals themselves. The authors, apart from Anne Mozley, were Frances Power Cobbe, George Eliot, Harriet Martineau, Margaret Oliphant and Elizabeth (Lady Eastlake) Rigby.

 

Ellen was then approached by Eileen Curran to test what Eileen suspected were Wellesley misattributions of the two Scottish writers John Stuart Blackie and John Hill Burton, both of whom were born in 1809 in Edinburgh, attended the same College and wrote for Tait's Edinburgh Review. In order to do this testing, it was necessary to begin adding male authors to the corpus. The authors added at this stage were those whose articles could be downloaded as electronic texts from the online Gutenberg collection.

 

The Centre's research assistant, Alexis Antonia, had assisted Ellen in building this initial corpus, and found that she very much enjoyed working with these periodical articles. When the opportunity arose for working on a Research Higher Degree, Alexis chose a topic which would involve using and expanding the existing Victorian Periodical Corpus.

 

Acquisition of Electronic Texts for the Corpus

Setting the boundaries and obtaining the texts:

  1. the fifty year period from 1830 to 1880 was chosen as encompassing what has been called "the golden years" of periodical writing. These were also the years during which the great anonymity versus signature debate was enacted. Anonymity was the norm at the beginning of this period, but gradually towards the end of it, signature was more in evidence. Though most of the articles in the corpus were anonymous at the time of publication, they have all been fairly reliably attributed and quite a few were subsequently republished in authorial collections of essays and writings. 
  2. the articles were all taken either from one of the major quarterlies or from one of a number of well-regarded monthlies.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

    Quarterlies                                           Monthlies

    Edinburgh Review                                    Blackwoods Edinburgh Review

    Quarterly Review                                     Cornhill Magazine

    Westminster Review                                Fortnightly Review (which became monthly)

    Bentley's Quarterly Review                       Frasers Magazine

    National Review                                      MacMillans Magazine

                                                                 Tait's Edinburgh Review

  3. authors were chosen with the idea of getting as wide a range as possible of writers who were known to have been writing for our listed periodical journals during our fifty year period.

    Men                                                              Women

    Walter Bagehot (1826-77)                                Frances Power Cobbe (1822-1904)

    John Stuart Blackie (1809-1895)                       Caroline Frances Cornwallis (1786-1858)

    John Hill Burton (1809-1881)                            George Eliot (1819-1880)

    Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)                            Harriet Martineau (1802-1876)

    Lord Robert Cecil (1830-1903)                          Anne Mozley (1809-1891)

    John Wilson Croker (1780-1857)                       Margaret Oliphant (1828-1897)

    James Anthony Froude (1819-1894)                  Elizabeth Lady Eastlake Rigby (1809-1893)

    William Rathbone Greg (1809-1881)

    Abraham Hayward (1801-1884)

    Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895)

    Charles Kingsley (1819-1875)

    George Henry Lewes (1817-1878)

    Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859)

    Sir Leslie Stephen (1832-1904)

  4. the following methods were used to obtain the electronic texts of Victorian Periodical articles in the Corpus:

    The first method used was to transcribe the text onto the computer from a photocopy of the journal article. This method was used subsequently for a number of MacMillans articles which the librarian in the University's Rare Books Collections photocopied for us.

    The second method was to find public domain electronic texts available in online collections. Of these, only Gutenberg allowed downloading of text in editable form.

    Other online collections such as the ILEJ (Bodley, Oxford) site for Blackwoods provided only photo image copies of texts; these could be printed for subsequent scanning or could be transcribed from the photo image into editable electronic text form.

    Newcastle University has a number of Victorian periodical journals (Westminster, Edinburgh, Frasers, Tait's and an incomplete MacMillans) available on microfilm. Microfilm printouts were obtained from these for many articles; most of these were transcribed onto the computer; occasionally a microfilm printout was considered clear enough to permit scanning.

    Where published editions of periodical articles existed in authorial collections of writings, these were photocopied and scanned. Sometimes, if the photocopy was not suitable for scanning, the article was transcribed.

    For journals, such as the Quarterly Review and the Fortnightly, which the Newcastle Library doesn't hold, Inter-Library loan requests obtained the file in TIFF format. These articles were printed and either transcribed or scanned depending on the quality of the copy.

 

Editing of the electronic texts in preparation for the Centre's counting programs.