RSVP

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals

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Discoveries and Surprises in The Salvation Army’s Prolific Press

by Flore Janssen

The Salvation Army and its Archive

At first glance The Salvation Army may seem like a world unto itself. The global church and charity grew out of the East London Christian Mission begun by preachers William and Catherine Booth in 1865. It is characterised by its own uniform, customs, and vocabulary. Its ministers are ‘officers’ with military-style ranks, its members are ‘soldiers’, its churches are ‘corps’. Its religious services feature their own repertoire of songs and take place in halls or ‘citadels’ in which a ‘mercy seat’ is a requirement. Yet in spite of this institutional singularity, the organisation, its emblematic red shield, and its magazine the War Cry are recognised around the world.

Outreach, social as well as religious, has been at the heart of The Salvation Army’s activities from its beginnings. The organisation has always responded to issues and events that concern the communities in which it works. As a result, the collections at The Salvation Army’s International Heritage Centre in London touch on a wide range of unexpected subjects including labour disputes, war-time civilian internment, and cookery. The Heritage Centre blog highlights surprising topics from women’s suffrage to vegetarianism.

Salvation Army Periodicals

The Heritage Centre’s large collection of periodicals issued by The Salvation Army around the world since the 1860s often bridges the gaps between the organisation’s internal workings and the wider world. As well as public-facing periodicals like the War Cry and its many international and multilingual variants, the collection includes publications aimed at The Salvation Army’s own vast and diverse membership. Examples include the Local Officer (1897–1908), targeted at non-ordained Salvationists holding positions of responsibility in their local corps, and the Salvationist, launched in 1986 ‘for everyone linked to The Salvation Army’.

Illustrated card acknowledging one shilling donated to The Salvation Army Self Denial Fund 1891, depicting Salvationists selling War Crys to hostile drinkers in a pub.
Figure 1: Donation acknowledgment featuring an illustration of War Cry-selling in a pub, 1891. All images in this post are from The Salvation Army International Heritage Centre’s collection.

The Salvation Army press has always aimed for a wide appeal, and this is mirrored in the variety of its content. The War Cry marked its 140th anniversary in December 2019 and continues to be sold to the public for the nominal price of 20p. Today, a typical issue may contain a review of a blockbuster film or popular TV show, an article on a community project, a cartoon, puzzles, and a recipe section. Many of these features have been established for decades to provide readers with information, spirituality, entertainment, and practical advice.

Recipes helped readers discover vegetarianism in the nineteenth century or cook under rationing during WWII. Book reviews guided Salvationists’ reading from the time when the organisation’s religious principles proscribed novels. Short and serial fiction narrated stories of redemption or illustrated social problems. Religious and social themes were explored through poetry and songs, sometimes with sheet music. The free legal advice column ‘Poor Man’s Lawyer’ first appeared in the Darkest England Gazette (1893–4) but survived this short-lived platform to be carried forward into its successor the Social Gazette (1894–1917) and later into the War Cry.

The Darkest England Gazette: The Official Newspaper of the Social Operations of The Salvation Army.
Figure 2: Masthead of the Darkest England Gazette.

The Darkest England Gazette

As Digital Humanities Project Officer I work closely with the Darkest England Gazette, a weekly publication dedicated to The Salvation Army’s ‘social operations’. It is one of the first periodicals included in the Heritage Centre’s pioneering digitisation project and various issues and articles are already available as part of our Digital Collections.

Identifying contributors to the magazine requires detailed research both within the collection and in unexpected places outside it. The Salvation Army’s record-keeping systems were not formalised in the late nineteenth century so we sometimes have little reliable information about people named in the Gazette. As a result, rather than use our archive catalogue to identify officers from this early period, the periodical is providing us with information about them.

The Gazette’s focus on different aspects of the social work helps us to associate names with specific social projects and institutions. For example, we can now tell that an article about the rehabilitation of ex-prisoners signed F. S. is likely to have been the work of Ensign Fred Symons who worked in The Salvation Army’s first Prison-Gate Home, the ‘Bridge’ near King’s Cross in London, where released prisoners were offered accommodation and work.

On the other hand, some contributors who were prominent figures during the period are given no introduction in the periodical and have to be identified through wider research. Leading animal welfare campaigner Edith Carrington contributed articles and letters about vivisection to the Darkest England Gazette, but she seems to have had no other connection to The Salvation Army and does not appear in our records. Other research revealed that regular Gazette illustrator F. W. Boyington also illustrated sensation fiction for children.[1] While the nineteenth-century Salvation Army would certainly have disapproved of this, some Gazette illustrations do make use of this sensational style (Fig. 3).

Illustration for an article titled ‘Poorest of the Poor’ showing a man entering a room to discover a dead woman lying on the floor.
Figure 3: F. W. Boyington, ‘Poorest of the Poor’, Darkest England Gazette, 24 March 1894, p. 8.

Research Leads in Periodicals

The long-standing, prolific, and diverse Salvation Army press is often one of the first avenues we recommend to researchers to explore. It covers an astonishing range of subjects, many of which surprise researchers who had not associated them with The Salvation Army. The topics are addressed in a wide variety of genres, from reportage to poetry and fiction, and the style of articles is as likely to be sensational or humorous as didactic or zealous. Discoveries in the periodicals may spark detailed investigations into our own archival collection or reveal links to other sources and repositories. In this way our periodical holdings frequently defy preconceptions about what can and cannot be found in the archives of The Salvation Army.

About the Author

Flore Janssen is Digital Humanities Project Officer at The Salvation Army International Heritage Centre. She conducted research for her own PhD (Birkbeck, 2018) in the archive and now works primarily with the historical periodicals in the collection. She also holds a Visiting Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Institute of English Studies, University of London.

[1] See for instance Popular Children’s Literature in Britain, ed. by Julia Briggs, Dennis Butts, and M. O. Grenby (London: Routledge, 2016).

Introducing the Atlas of Digitised Newspapers and Metadata

By Emily Bell and M. H. Beals

Infographic showing the data we worked with to create the Atlas of Digitised Newspapers and Metadata
Fig. 1. Infographic showing the data we worked with to create the Atlas of Digitised Newspapers and Metadata.

Just as the nineteenth-century newspaper was a messy object, filled with an ever-changing mix of material in an innumerable number of amorphous layouts, working with the structures of digitised newspapers is no different. While a user approaching a digitised newspaper collection through a glossy web interface and inputting keywords might not realise it, there are decades of decision-making processes still influencing what exactly it’s possible for that user to search for, and what they will find.[i] And if you’ve ever wondered why there isn’t one enormous search engine for newspapers and periodicals that aggregates global collections and makes them available in one place… well, this blog post will start to introduce the scale of the problem.

In January 2020, the ‘Oceanic Exchanges: Tracing Global Information Networks in Historical Newspaper Repositories, 1840-1914’ project, an AHRC/ESRC-funded ‘Digging into Data’ project that brought together a consortium of cultural historians, computational linguistics, literary scholars, digital curators, humanists, and computer scientists, launched a new resource for periodicals scholars (and anyone working with digitised newspapers): the Atlas of Digitised Newspapers and Metadata.[ii]

Working closely with the British Library 19th Century Newspapers, Chronicling America, Delpher, Europeana, the National Digital Newspaper Archive of Mexico, Papers Past, the National Library of Finland, the Times Digital Archive, Trove and ZEFYS, the project aimed to gain a clearer understanding of the ways these collections were built, both in terms of the institutional decision-making (i.e. selection decisions, funding and so on) and the metadata structure of newspapers within the collections.

Each of the databases contains a (theoretically) standardised collection of data, metadata, and images; however, the precise nature and nuance of the data is often occluded by the processes that encoded it. For example, if you’re looking for headlines only (as opposed to titles), you need a distinction that simply isn’t there. No true universal standard has been implemented, or even proposed, to facilitate cross-database analysis, encouraging digital research to remain within those existing institutional or commercial silos.

Optical Character Recognition and Optical Layout Recognition (also known as document layout analysis) also don’t currently allow for any sense of how the elements they analyse might change over time. Titles versus headlines is a good example. Headlines weren’t common in the UK until at least the 1870s, though they were introduced earlier in the US. Once headlines come in, it’s much easier to identify them as bigger blocks on the page (a spatial feature as much as a semantic one) but there is a large amount of variation between countries and even individual titles.

What we’re essentially pushing for is historically informed metadata that takes into account that the newspaper changed, and is still changing. This is to prevent an oversimplification that technology sometimes encourages: for example, most archives only digitise one newspaper edition per day, so those researching morning, afternoon and evening editions will find that many databases simply don’t have them.

Picture of The Sun newspaper showing one article within a column containing several articles, and one article split into several columns.
Fig. 2. The Sun, 26 November 1899: 1. Web. 14 Feb 2020, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-page23084393. Showing one article within a column containing several articles, and one article split into several columns.

Our open access report draws on ontologies of the file formats and ontologies and taxonomies of the newspaper itself, digitisation guidelines, the libraries’ websites, scholarly literature, grey literature (including digitisation strategies and annual reports), interviews with staff conducted in 2018, some shrewd use of rumours about institutional decision-making, and retro-engineering we’ve done ourselves. It offers abbreviated histories of the ten newspaper databases, including the chronology of their development, a discussion of each one’s aims and offerings, and a report on its current status and availability.

We tried to map all of the metadata fields – over 3300 different lines – directly, to find the same data in the different databases. This raised ontological issues not only in developing hierarchies and links between the fields of the various databases, but in understanding the vocabulary employed to describe elements and characteristics of the physical newspaper as well. In order to decide the structure, you need to consider the hierarchy of the newspaper. For example, is an article a smaller unit than a column? Or is a column a unit within an article (see fig. 2)? Does that remain the same throughout the nineteenth century and across different periodical types? Is a supplement part of an issue, or is it separate?

Image of xkcd cartoon, "Standards"
Fig. 3. ‘Standards.’ https://xkcd.com/927/.

What we found was that it isn’t possible to reconcile these problems without falling into the trap of trying to create our own standard, and digitisers and researchers recognise that actually the messiness is inherent in the newspaper as a complex and evolving form, rather than it simply being a problem of messy metadata. Simple concepts like “title”, “publisher” and “article” became very complicated, very quickly – for example, was it a standardised title, or the title as printed on the physical object, or a variant title? Did it include the subtitle and/or motto? Was the “article” the document type or the genre (i.e. in contrast to classified adverts and images?). The heart of the report is a newspaper glossary that takes this very technical detail about digitised newspapers and brings it into conversation with researchers and press history. This is to allow people to understand a) how the term is being used in different ways by different groups and b) to help people map the type of information they really want with the data that is available in these collections.

The Atlas is (we hope) a first step in a multidisciplinary conversation, and one with a primarily Anglophone focus. We’re now hoping to encourage new tools and approaches to collections using our dataset, and we’ve opened the Atlas to contributors. We hope RSVP members will explore it, and we’d be pleased to hear any feedback about how it might be used and expanded.

Download the Atlas:
Beals, M. H. and Emily Bell, with contributions by Ryan Cordell, Paul Fyfe, Isabel Galina Russell, Tessa Hauswedell, Clemens Neudecker, Julianne Nyhan, Mila Oiva, Sebastian Padó, Miriam Peña Pimentel, Lara Rose, Hannu Salmi, Melissa Terras, and Lorella Viola. The Atlas of Digitised Newspapers and Metadata: Reports from Oceanic Exchanges. Loughborough: 2020. DOI:10.6084/m9.figshare.11560059.

[i] Tessa Hauswedell, Julianne Nyhan, M. H. Beals, Melissa Terras and Emily Bell. ‘Of global reach yet of situated contexts: an examination of the implicit and explicit selection criteria that shape digital archives of historical newspapers.’ Arch Sci (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-020-09332-1.

[ii] M. H. Beals and Emily Bell, with contributions by Ryan Cordell, Paul Fyfe, Isabel Galina Russell, Tessa Hauswedell, Clemens Neudecker, Julianne Nyhan, Mila Oiva, Sebastian Padó, Miriam Peña Pimentel, Lara Rose, Hannu Salmi, Melissa Terras, and Lorella Viola. The Atlas of Digitised Newspapers and Metadata: Reports from Oceanic Exchanges. Loughborough: 2020. DOI:10.6084/m9.figshare.11560059.

Congratulations to Our 2020 Curran Fellowship Winners

Last week we announced our Curran Fellowship winners for 2020 via our monthly newsletter. Curran Fellowships are awarded annually to help scholars defray the costs of travel to and research on primary sources and archives in the 19th-century periodical press. Applicants’ projected research may involve study of any aspects of the periodical press in any of its manifold forms, and may range from within Britain itself to the many countries, within and outside of the Empire, where British magazines and newspapers were bought, sold, and read during “the long nineteenth century” (ca. 1780-1914). Awards are made possible through the generosity of the late Eileen Curran, Professor Emerita of English, Colby College and long-time RSVP member.

This year our Curran Fellowship winners embark on a diverse variety of projects, from exploring global interactions to shifting temporal boundaries to uncovering understudied areas of periodical interest. The winning projects are as follows (full abstracts available here):

    • Diana Muriel Cooper-Richet (Centre d’histoire culturelle des sociétés contemporaines, Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines), English-Language Periodicals Published in French Provincial Towns (1818-1912) 
    • Lydia Craig (Loyola University Chicago), Female Philanthropic Knitting:  Lady Harriet Scott’s “Grandmother” Patterns in The Queen    
    • Laura Diaz-Esteve (Universitat Pompeu Fabra), The Southeast Asia British Press and the Philippine-American War (1898-1902)
    • Beth Gaskell, The History of Early Regimental Journals
    • Erica Haugtvedt (South Dakota School of Mines & Technology), Transfictional Character and Transmedia Storyworlds in the British Long Nineteenth Century         
    • Sofia Huggins (Texas Christian University), Blank Spaces: Global Geographies of Moral Capitalism in the Anti-Slavery Reporter, 1831-1833      
    • Haejoo Kim (Syracuse University), Anti-Vaccination Periodicals and the Rise of Lay Medical Agency in Nineteenth-Century Britain
    • Carole O’Reilly (University of Salford), Satirising the City: Civic Humour, Place and Accountability in the Later Nineteenth Century Satirical Press       
    • Neil Ramsey (University of New South Wales Canberra), Romantic Era Military Periodicals and the Emotions of War
    • Maryam Sikander (SOAS University of London),  Punch in India: The Transcultural Life of a British Institution     
    • Matthew Wale, The Natural History Periodicals of Edward Newman (1801-1876)

Thank you to all who applied and congratulations to this year’s winners. We look forward to seeing how you advance our understanding of the Victorian periodical press!

New Year, New Deadlines Announced

RSVP is pleased to announce the deadlines for two of our most popular awards: The Linda H. Peterson Fellowship and RSVP Field Development Grant. Applications for both awards will open February 3, 2020 via our online applications portal. Final applications for each award are due March 15, 2020. So, now is the time to start assembling your ideas and application materials!

Peterson Fellowships for Individual Researchers

In 2020, RSVP will grant one Linda H. Peterson Fellowship of $17,500 to a single researcher for a period equivalent to four, full-time months in calendar years 2020 and/or 2021.

Named for pioneering periodicals scholar and mentor Linda H. Peterson (1948-2015), the Peterson Fellowship supports the study of primary sources from the nineteenth-century British periodical press. Projects range from studying periodicals within Britain itself to the wider Empire where British magazines and newspapers were bought, sold, and read during the “long nineteenth century” (ca. 1780-1914).

The Peterson Fellowship is intended to provide a researcher with the most valuable scholarly resource—time. Funds may be used to supplement sabbatical or other grant income, provide course “buy outs,” and/or conduct travel related to the project.  During the award period, a grantee may conduct secondary research, write, or pursue other scholarly activities related to their proposed project. That said, eligible projects must include substantial research involving nineteenth-century primary sources, whether those sources appear in print, manuscript, or digital facsimile.

Development Grants for Enhancing Periodical Studies

RSVP’s Field Development Grant exists to help one researcher or a team of collaborators create resources that will facilitate the work of other nineteenth-century periodical scholars. The annual grant is made possible by a generous bequest from the late Eileen Curran, Emerita Professor of English at Colby College and an integral member of RSVP.

RSVP intends to grant one Field Development award of up to $27,500 in 2020 to a single researcher or a team of researchers. Two smaller awards may be given if the right projects present themselves. Research must begin during the 2020 or 2021 calendar year and conclude within one year of receipt.

Regardless of method or type, projects supported by the RSVP Field Development Grant must advance the study of the nineteenth-century British periodical press in some way. Typical projects include:

  • Collaborations to produce print or digital publications
  • Demonstration projects that make use of new technologies
  • Research tools such as indices and bibliographies
  • Digitization efforts
  • Workshops or seminars that address research methods for the study of periodicals

While collaboration is not a requirement, the grant is intended to give researchers meaningful opportunities for collaboration. Thus, awards may be divided among participants to be used for things like salary replacement, travel, funding for research or technical assistants, hardware or software purchases, securing permissions or rights, and/or other research expenses directly related to the project.

More Details On Our Website

For application details and full eligibility requirements, please visit our website. All applicants are strongly encouraged—but not required—to become members of RSVP. Please note that Officers and Directors are not eligible to apply for either award. If you have further questions, please don’t hesitate to contact our Society president.

Applications for The Curran Fellowships Now Open

Applications for our annual Curran Fellowships are now open! We’re currently accepting applications for projects beginning in 2020 through December 1, 2019 at 11:59 p.m. (US Pacific Time, or UTC/GMT -7). The Curran Fellowships are research and travel awards intended to support the use of primary sources to explore any aspect of the British periodical press of the “long nineteenth century” (ca. 1780-1914) in any of its manifold forms: magazines, newspapers, and serial publications from across the British Empire.

Up to $5,000 of Research Funding Available

We anticipate making at least six Curran Fellowships available for research starting in 2020. Applicants may request any amount of support up to $5,000. Funds must be used for expenses directly related to your research, such as:

    • Transportation costs
    • Lodging
    • Photocopies and/or scanning of documents
    • Database subscriptions

Indirect expenses will not be covered by Fellowship funds. Award winners will be selected by February 1, 2020.

How Do I Apply?

All interested scholars should submit application materials through our online applications portal. Only complete applications submitted by the deadline of December 1, 2019, will be considered. Applications should include:

    • An application form, which includes personal and project details such as a proposed title, period of study, amount requested (not to exceed $5000), and a brief description
    • Your c.v. (no longer than two pages)
    • A narrative proposal not to exceed three single-spaced pages
    • A one-page description of the printed and manuscript materials you wish to explore and why
    • The name and email address of one external recommender familiar with your project

Applications will be evaluated according to the importance of the project, the quality of the application, the applicant’s preparation to pursue the project, and the feasibility of the plan of work. Our evaluators will use these criteria to select best applications. Final decisions and award amounts will be based on the overall budget of the program, specific amounts requested, and the justification of that amount as put forward in the proposed plan of work.

You can download the full details here or visit our Curran Fellowships page for more information.

The Fine Print

All research projects must directly engage primary texts of the Victorian periodical press, such as magazines, newspapers, or serial publications published during the long nineteenth century. What form those sources take – print, manuscript, or digital facsimile – is up to you, as long as they are primary sources.

Curran Fellowships are intended to expand and enrich our collective understanding of the nineteenth century periodical press. Therefore, all else being equal, preference will be given to projects that use or bring to light new or little-known materials. For a list of recent winners and their projects, visit our Curran Fellowships page (scroll to the bottom of the page).

Fellowships are open to scholars of all kinds, including those holding academic appointments, graduate students, and independent or retired scholars. Applicants are strongly encouraged, but not required, to become RSVP members. Please note that Officers and Directors of RSVP are not eligible to apply.

If you have any questions about the award or application requirements, you may contact us at curranfellowships@rs4vp.org.

 

 

 

CFP: 2020 Annual Conference on Revolution(s), Evolution(s), Circulation(s)

Start Evolving or Circulating Your Ideas Now

Calling all Victorianists and periodical studies scholars! Our 2020 annual conference call for papers is now available on our website. Proposals relevant to the conference theme of Revolution(s), Evolution(s), Circulation(s) are particularly welcome, though papers and panel proposals that address any aspect of the Victorian periodical or newspaper press are invited.

Proposals for 20-minute papers or panels should be submitted no later than February 14, 2020 at our online application portal. In addition to a short information form, applicants should include the following documents in their applications:

  • Individual papers: A 250-word abstract with a title, plus a separate 75-word biographical statement.
  • Panel proposals: A set of three or four 250-word abstracts with titles, plus a general title for the session. Additionally, include 75-word biographical statement for each participant on the panel.

 

All those giving papers at the RSVP conference are required to be members of the Society.

Conference Funding Opportunities

Graduate students and independent or retired scholars may indicate on the form that they wish to be considered for RSVP travel awards to attend the conference and present a paper.

See our Conference page for more details or download the official CFP here. We’re looking forward to hearing your revolutionary ideas!