Back in 2020, Viral Texts Project co-PI Ryan Cordell—henceforth “I,” as I’m also the one writing here—wrote about our collective failure to develop and maintain a database of the reprints we have uncovered through the project. In that post I outlined some of the reasons this imagined database had thus far failed to materalize, and tried to think through the ways the project has evolved as a result. I concluded, however, that those explanations were not a satisfactory conclusion:
I always keep in my mind a prototypical nineteenth-century scholar that I hope our project can address: someone who does incredible archival work and is not hostile to digital methods, though they don’t employ digital methods in their own work. Someone who wants to learn more about how a particular set of texts, or a particular author’s work, were shared in nineteenth-century newspapers and hopes to use our findings to learn more. Someone, however, who would encounter gigabytes of CSV files and have no idea how to begin sifting through them to find the texts they are interested in. For that scholar, our project is thus far a failure, and I am not content with that reality.
Thanks to stellar work from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign iSchool PhD student Daniel Evans, with incredible support from Ben Galewsky at Illinois Computes, that reality has finally changed.
At http://clusters.viraltexts.org we now provide search and download access to the “speculative bibliographies” of reprinted nineteenth-century newspaper texts discovered through Viral Texts research. We highly recommend users spend some time with the database’s About page before searching, so that the peculiarities of our data and the resulting database structure will be clear. As we note there:
One reason we share this data is, frankly, there is just so much of it. There are millions of clusters in our current dataset—far more than any one scholar could study in a lifetime. We hope other scholars across fields will find useful information here about texts, authors, or genres they care about.
If you make use of this data, please cite it and also—please let us know! We’re always interested to hear what others might be learning about nineteenth-century newspaper reprinting, and we’re always eager to hear ideas about potential side projects or collaborations!
We are still actively developing the database site, so there may be changes or updates in the coming months. If you have suggestions for better usability, do send suggestions.