Paul Fyfe on Past & Presentism: How Computers See Victorian Periodicals

This talk shares experiments at NC State University to use computer vision and image analytics on a corpus of nineteenth-century illustrated periodicals. These experiments help push digital humanities to consider more multimodal content than text as well as provoke reflections about the historical functions of illustrated periodicals and the development of concepts of “visualization.” Ultimately, he argues for a dynamic of digital experiment and Victorian media as an example of the “strategic presentism” underway in literary studies.

Paul Fyfe is Associate Professor of English at North Carolina State University. His research and teaching include British Victorian literature, nineteenth-century book and media history, scholarly communications, and a variety of digital humanities practices.  Currently, he is working on a book called The Age of Transmission, a long history of digital humanities based in nineteenth-century media cultures. This work is generously supported by a 2018-2019 ACLS Burkhardt Fellowship at the National Humanities Center. He also participates in a few digital research projects, such as Oceanic Exchanges which tracks information flow across international nineteenth-century newspaper networks; Illustrated Image Analytics which experiments with how computer vision can search and sort Victorian periodical illustrations; Speech Across Dialects of English (SPADE) with colleagues in linguistics; and Victoria’s Lost Pavilion which virtually reconstructs Queen Victoria’s garden pavilion as a three-dimensional model.

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