- 1 Quoted in Cohen and Scheinfeldt, 157.
If what the digital does is just take the old disciplines and make them digital, leaving disciplinarity and the silo structure of the university intact, it will have failed. I want to see the digital transform not just the content or practice of the disciplines, but the very idea of disciplinarity.
David Parry1
1In the last couple of decades, acceleration in technology and the development of artificial intelligence have started not only modifying the way we navigate but also the way we learn, travel and generally interact with our fellow academics, students and the broader world we live in. New modes of communication have also massively changed the contents and format of academic research to the point where most universities have had to change their expectations, grading systems and teaching schemes (while satisfying the requirement to accommodate to new economic demands). While pockets of resistance remain and some of us still bravely decide to ignore the use of A.I. or the shorter attention span of students in their daily teaching routines, I have been thinking about the many positive effects these cultural changes have had on my particular experience as a Victorian scholar but also as Chair of the French Victorian Society (SFEVE).
2In this short contribution celebrating the 50th anniversary of one of the most prominent scholarly journals on the Victorian period, the Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens, I intend to offer a few thoughts about the ways in which research in Victorian studies has been significantly impacted by the use of digital tools and the growing sense of a global, connected world. Rather than focussing on technology per se, I will focus on interdisciplinarity, one of the key words that, I think, defines my personal path as a researcher and also characterizes the nature of the CVE themselves. While the first part of my paper will be devoted to a few comments on the debates over interdisciplinarity in the field of Victorian Studies in the course of the twentieth century, the second part will be devoted to looking at several major Digital Humanities projects by various eminent Victorianists and the growing influence of D.H. on current research.
3In the last fifty years, the notion of interdisciplinarity has been widely discussed and questioned in many fields of knowledge, including Victorian studies where it has regularly appeared in various special issues and round table conferences, sometimes coinciding with the birth of new periodicals (Victorian Review, 1972) or the publication of special issues devoted to the topic.
4As Julie Thompson Klein reminds us, the notion is fairly new and was inherited from the nineteenth century: ‘The modern connotation of disciplinarity is a product of the nineteenth century and is linked with several forces: the evolution of the modern natural sciences, the general “scientification” of knowledge, the industrial revolution, technological advancements, and agrarian agitation’ (Klein 21). For any Victorianist, the crossing of boundaries that it involves certainly belongs to two eras: a somewhat nostalgic and idealized view of the infinite knowledge one could cover in the Victorian age and a very modern sense that today’s major research projects can only be led by engaging with other fields. Indeed, as Francis O’Gorman writes:
Modern interdisciplinarity takes some authority from the Victorian period: George Henry Lewes, John Ruskin, John Stuart Mill, and Leslie Stephen are among the tutelary figures: the Cornhill, the Fortnightly, even the Strand are among suggestive print precursors. (O’Gorman 44)
5As he underlines, the most current appeal of interdisciplinarity may be more of an institutional incentive to attract funds and answer political agendas. However, I would be tempted to say that, along the way, it has also greatly benefitted the advancement of knowledge in two ways: first, by creating whole new disciplines; second, by reversing the role of the humanities in the ‘two-culture’ divide (C. P. Snow). Indeed, as Frodeman and Mitcham point out in their seminal article, ‘New Directions in Interdisciplinarity: Broad, Deep and Critical’, each effort at interdisciplinarity has served ‘as preamble to further disciplinary specialization and production’ (Frodeman and Mitcham 510). Comparing what happened in the physical sciences and engineering and what happened in the humanities, they then note:
Area studies (American Studies, Latin American Studies, Asian Studies) prospered and were soon complemented by Black Studies, Women’s Studies, Popular Culture Studies, and more. The humanities saw the wholesale borrowing of methodologies as hermeneutics, phenomenology, structuralism, poststructuralism, and deconstruction flowed across the liberal arts and to a lesser degree into the social sciences. But by and large, just as in the physical sciences, the result was more new disciplinary formations from what began as interdisciplinary exchanges. (Frodeman & Mitcham 510)
6One case in point in the broad field of literary criticism is the birth of text and image studies, which was formalised in 1977 through the International Association for Word and Image Studies (IAWIS) that aimed to foster dialogue between literature and the arts, giving rise to the field now referred to as ‘intermedial studies’. In the field of Victorian studies more specifically, one can think of the ground-breaking work of Dame Gillian Beer and George Levine, who both explored art and science relations, making readers envisage Charles Darwin’s evolutionary ideas within the context of stories and myths. In Darwin’s Plots (Beer 1983) and Darwin and the Novelists (Levine 1988), both Victorianists explored how scientific thought could be recognized as a thoroughly imaginative endeavour, thus realigning science and fiction (or science as fiction) and showing how literary criticism and cultural studies could be used to shed light on every field of a given period.
7In this case, interdisciplinarity is put forward and celebrated as a way of crossing boundaries and reducing the superiority of one discipline over another and not necessarily as a way to help promote new emerging disciplines. As Priya Venkatesan Hays writes in her article entitled ‘Cross Talk: Why we Need—and Should Desire—Interdisciplinarity’, in this instance as in the case she examines (between the fields of bioethics and science studies) the idea is ‘to evince that the process of interdisciplinarity can inform the academy and create dialogue rather than become a precursor to specific disciplines’ (226). In a similar way, since the turn of the twenty-first century, new technology and computer science have suffused many areas of Victorian studies and helped develop major interartistic research projects. Is there a continuum between these early innovative digital projects and the collaborative digital humanities projects that are currently in vogue in Victorian studies? Does this shift signal a change in methodologies or does it initiate a new paradigm in the way we look at discipline?
8Since the 1980s, several remarkable digital media projects emerged in the field of Victorian Studies that forever changed the way scholars (and the general public) may access primary sources and secondary criticism. All of them share one common feature: combining textual and visual documents and building a network of resources aimed at expanding research and academic networks.
9First among those, the Victorian Web, founded by the late Professor Landow as early as 1994 foregrounds its innovative way of linking text and image materials:
In addition to providing a continually expanding collection of interlinked document and images, The Victorian Web also serves as a laboratory or testbed to discover ways to make visual and textual materials more attractive and more useful to its users. One chief area of such research involves increasingly the usefulness of so-called legacy materials, chiefly books and articles that originally appeared in print. Here the question is, ‘How can one add value to an electronic version of a major text that in some way makes up for the fact that reading it online deprives readers of some of the pleasures of using a physical text’. . . .
10From the tangible text or physical object to the online experience, the idea is to use digital media in order to ‘enhance users’ experience’ as well as ‘explore and possibly invent, new, more effective forms of scholarly writing’ (https://victorianweb.org/misc/vwintro.html).
11Even from that early stage of development, connections were made between various types of documents so that the scholar’s experience was greatly enriched by the various links provided by the website. In the same fashion, and around the same year (1993), The Rossetti Archive, edited by Jerome J. McGann, allowed D. G. Rossetti’s scholars to have access to all of the artist’s pictorial and textual work. In these pioneering projects, interdisciplinarity was key in two crucial aspects: first, having humanists from several departments work together; second, encouraging them in implementing digital approaches to their own subject areas in collaboration with computer scientists. In both cases, and from my own experience as a contributor to the Victorian Web and a regular user of the Rossetti Archive, both projects radically changed the way research could be done because it changed the way one could think about a particular author or artist and recreate his or her intellectual entourage, influences and the way other critics had studied them before.
12Since then, other digital humanities projects have developed, such as Nines, Cove, or One More Voice which have all relied on computer programming to extend scholarship in all areas of the humanities. As the University of Virginia website notes:
. . . computer-assisted scholarship is [often] interdisciplinary [as] it goes beyond routine use of computers in research and the classroom, testing the potential of computational methods to advance a specific inquiry in ways not otherwise feasible. DH investigations address questions and weigh evidence appropriate to humanities disciplines, from philosophy and ethics to the history of language, from aesthetics to world cultures and social justice. (https://dh.library.virginia.edu/what-are-digital-humanities)
13While these research projects rely on interdisciplinarity, I would argue that they also induce a change in power relations and hierarchy: just as open access digital publication expands readership, so Digital Humanities projects tend to connect people in an unprecedented way, bringing collaboration to the fore. Such is the case for instance with the editorial and teaching project, Cove (Cove Editions and Cove Studio) initiated by Dino Felluga which allows Victorianists from all over the world to share the same teaching platform, exchange best practices and feel that they belong to a wider and more inclusive community. In a similar way, Adrian Wisnicki’s several major D.H. projects not only promote interdisciplinarity but also transdisciplinarity as they invite Victorian scholars and teachers to think about borders, biases and boundaries and find ways to transcend them. In both Undisciplining the Victorian classroom and One More Voice, the main idea is to decenter one’s point of view and acknowledge one’s own identity as well as the many gaps in knowledge that remain to be filled. Thus, the mission statement clearly includes a self-reflexive dimension that can be applied in all case studies:
The recovery work of One More Voice will always be incomplete due to the fragmentary nature of imperial and colonial archives. It follows that our project does not seek to be totalizing and comprehensive, nor its goal simply to add more voices to the nineteenth-century British historical and literary canons. Rather, One More Voice foregrounds the many racialized voices that exist in the archives of empire and, by doing so, asks critics and others to revise their understanding of the contents of these archives because of these frequently overlooked voices.
14Through these kinds of projects, interdisciplinarity itself is foregrounded and yet the relation between disciplines is one of cooperation and not competition or conflict as it sometimes used to be. Indeed, as Alexandra Wettlaufer underlined long ago, up until recently, having an interdisciplinary approach somehow implied treading, or even impinging on someone’s ground, an action she likens to cultural imperialism as she writes:
Interdisciplinary endeavors of all kinds—whether artistic or scholarly—have always elicited anxiety as well as criticism, for the crossing of disciplinary or generic boundaries brings with it a fear of colonization and domination by a threatening Other. In writings from the Renaissance to today, critics of interdisciplinarity have employed metaphors of violence and violation, transforming the various genres of artistic and intellectual expression into territories or even bodies that are invaded and desecrated. (Wettlaufer 15)
15By contrast, contemporary Digital Humanities projects invite us to revisit all the areas of Victorian culture while holding up a mirror as to our own political and ethical stance—in what is essentially a humanistic and humble position—contributing to an ever-growing archive of critical work whose circulation is open and global.
16As a Victorian scholar, I have often been asked why I was first attracted to the nineteenth century and I now think the main reason was precisely because it was a time of innovation, acceleration and great complexity when new technologies (print culture, photography, the train, etc.) impacted all fields from health, geography to literature and the arts. Dizzying as it is, the current watershed created by the development of Artificial Intelligence will no doubt be an opportunity for the Victorian research community to transcend boundaries and reimagine what interconnectedness can mean today. To this wider Victorian Web, the Cahiers Victoriens et Édouardiens and its partner society, the Société Française des Etudes Victoriennes et Édouardiennes clearly belong as their founding principles were based from the start on inclusiveness, serious scholarship and cooperation.
17In an article about interdisciplinarity, Denis Denisoff once wrote: ‘The image of an academic sitting at a sun-dappled oak desk with a mug of coffee and a sprawl of open books as she works alone to make insightful new connections has begun to seem something of an idyll’ (25). As hypermedia and digital humanities may drive us away from the very material and sensory experience of reading books that other eyes have seen, holding notebooks other hands have held and then written about, I think we can only be grateful that the aptly-named Cahiers Victoriens et Édouardiens have successfully achieved their digital mutation while retaining their initial material identity—augmenting its international readership while cultivating its highly interdisciplinary nature.