Teaching Transatlanticism: Resources for Teaching Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Print Culture ed. by Linda K. Hughes and Sarah R. Robbins (review)

[...]they discuss the spatial configuration of their seminar: the Atlantic basin, which comprises the United States, Canada, and the Caribbean on one side and Britain on the other.In her recent article, "The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast," Lara Putnam demonstrates the interrelatedness of the digital and transnational turn (American Historical Review 121, no. 2 [2016]: 377-402).Because all sorts of texts, such as books and newspapers, have been digitized and are relatively easy to access, subjects, themes, or persons can easily be traced all over the globe by researchers and students alike.In addition to Putnam's caution, I would add that researchers of nineteenth-century periodicals should be aware that the digital turn clearly favours our own beloved subject.Because national libraries started to systematically preserve all sorts of publications in the nineteenth century, printed material from this age is readily available today, while the use of standardised types and non-pulp paper allowed for good quality scans, which results in reasonable OCR recognition.[...]while access to many twentieth-century publications is restricted by copyright, most nineteenth-century publications are in the public domain, which favours their large-scale digitization by public or private parties.