The communications revolution has gone viral in Britain this summer. The recent riots and looting appear to have been co-ordinated by smart phones and social networking sites. Gone, it seems, are the days when hoodlums fomented insurrection with a combination of furtive messages and indiosyncratic tic-tac.
I doubt that facilitating mass disorder was quite how Steve Jobs et al envisaged their genius being used, but perhaps they will be better pleased by how their inventions are reviving the worlds of literature and academia. So far this summer, the British Library has digitalised a great portion of its archive for the use of the virtual public, publishers have introduced ‘apps’ to extend their classic back catalogues to new audiences, and Oxford University has encouraged novices to translate and interpret ancient documents and fragments over the Internet.
Now, Buckingham University has introduced a similar innovation. It has digitalised the back issues of All the Year Round, a Victorian current affairs journal edited by Charles Dickens, in which some of his renowned state of the nation novels were serialised. The paper also featured contributions from the Brownings, Wilkie Collins and Elizabeth Gaskell. Its literary and historical importance cannot be overstated.
30,000 pages of that voluminously dense print, the characteristic of Victorian public documents, have been uploaded and are now being emailed to amateur editors, who have been asked to proof read some of the mass of copy. It is hoped that All the Year Round will be ready for public display on 7 February 2012, the bicentenary of Dickens’ birth. If you are as willing as Barkis (albeit for editing rather than Peggotty), then sign up to the project here.
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