Fugitive texts: replication, attribution and bibliography in the digitised archive

Beginning from the porous textual boundaries (of transmission, genre, and authorship) uncovered in nineteenth-century American newspapers by the Viral Texts project (http://viraltexts.org), this paper will consider the challenges such historical media pose to literary-historical analysis and bibliography. What is ‘the text’ which replicates and echoes—with losses and gains—through 150 different newspapers, editors, and readerships, all dispersed both spatially and temporally? How can we mark its repetitions without flattening its circulation and changeability? And, finally, how might the maps and networks of our new media help us think more capaciously about bibliography as an analytical tool? Ryan Cordell is Assistant Professor of English and Core Founding Faculty Member in the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks at Northeastern University (http://nulab.neu.edu). His scholarship focuses on convergences among literary, periodical, and religious culture in antebellum American mass media. Ryan collaborates with colleagues in English, History, and Computer Science on the NEH-funded Viral Texts project (http://viraltexts.org), which uses robust data mining tools to discover reprinted content across large-scale archives of nineteenth-century newspapers and magazines. Presented as part of the Literary Studies Seminar Series