Owen Monroe's Preliminary Examination

This dissertation proposal argues that the early British Victorian Periodicals, The Penny Magazine, The Saturday Magazine, and Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal constitute the genre of the “knowledge magazine.” I will study the history of the magazines’ production, editorship, and publication, while defining and analyzing their genre through textual structure and content. Viewing genre through the dialogic relationship between texts, I will examine how the periodicals juxtapose articles, incorporate scientific and religious discourse, and reprint texts. Applying digital methods that use computer vision models, topic modeling, text classification, and text reuse detection algorithms, I will create a dataset that represents how periodical texts are structured, remediated, and combined within magazine page space. Book history research and data-driven methods reveal editorial conventions in periodical composition and provide opportunities for close reading of textual meaning and analysis of large patterns of textual structures. I argue that knowledge magazines were a didactic genre that sought to manage the anxieties of industrialization and remediate new science writing to align with the perspectives of powerful publishing organizations connected to the British government and Anglican Church. 

Questions? Contact Elizabeth Hoiem and Owen Monroe.