DIGITAL SCHOLARLY RESOURCES FOR THE STUDY OF VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

My aim in this essay is to provide a categorical map to the landscape of digital resources available to enrich scholarship on Victorian literature and culture. But I also want to reflect for a moment on the general state of digital scholarly work within the larger institutional structures of our disciplines. For over a decade now, digital resources relevant to the study of nineteenth-century literature and culture have been proliferating, becoming part of the way we live now as scholars and teachers. Yet reviews of such resources in standard channels have thus far been rare. There are a number of reasons for this state of affairs, all related primarily to the fact that digital projects have developed outside the well-settled infrastructure that has supported the academic book. This infrastructure is familiar to us, involving a network of institutions that includes publishers, libraries, scholarly societies, humanities departments, and academic journals like Victorian Literature and Culture. The scene of production of digital scholarship is, by contrast, variable and dynamic, involving experimental platforms, emergent collaborations, competing standards, rapidly-evolving technologies, and unfamiliar genres. Perhaps most crucially, digital scholarly resources in our field have only recently (with the advent of NINES [http://www.nines.org] in 2005) begun to receive systematic peer-review, of which post-publication reviews in academic journals have been a part. Because digital projects are more process than finished product (i.e., they are never “done” in the way a book is), they have tended to elude the reviewers. As a result of this unsettled environment, digital scholarship still abides in the shadows of the printed monographs, articles, and editions by which we have long measured achievement in the field.