Like all editions, ncse makes an argument about its contents. The project team saw the project as a chance to explore two research questions: how can you edit nineteenth-century serials in a scholarly edition; and how can digital resources be best used to model nineteenth-century serials in paper? ncse provides an answer to both of these questions. We approached the serials as objects to be edited in their own right, rejecting approaches that would privilege certain types of content, certain periods, or certain figures. We then explored how to represent these data structures in digital form, working with Olive Software to adapt their Viewpoint application and with the Centre for Computing in the Humanities to integrate it with our own bespoke site with its own metadata and search functions. For further information about our methdology, click here for the editorial commentary and here for the history of the project.

The majority of our content was contributed by the British Library. However, this material was supplemented from a variety of institutions and individuals: the Northern Star portraits came from the National Portrait Gallery and from the collection of Dorothy Thompson; the 1827 volume of the Monthly Repository and issues 165-173 of Tomahawk came from the Bodleian; and the English Woman’s Journal is from the Women’s Library. John North generously helped us build our advanced metadata with his indices from the Waterloo Directory of English Periodicals and Newspapers and J. Thomas, P. T. Killick, A. A. Mandal, and D. J. Skilton generously let us adapt the iconographic schema from their Database of Mid-Victorian wood-engraved Illustration for our image metadata.

Project Partners

Contributors