Collaborative Knowledge and Merging Media: Teaching Victorian Periodical Print Using Digital Tools

Abstract

[...]despite the prominence of periodical studies over the past twenty years, few teaching texts emphasize the periodical origins of the selections they anthologize.5 One way that we have addressed the absence of pedagogical resources for the study of periodical literature is through class trips to archives and assignments that require students to develop a familiarity with both the digital collections of periodical literature (such as the Database of Victorian Periodical Poetry) and the periodicals housed in special collections. [...]we have designed assignments that push our third- and fourth-year Victorian literature students (some English majors and some not) even further, asking them to create supplementary resources for the Database of Victorian Periodical Poetry through wiki entries (Ehnes) and requiring students to produce digital resources that highlight the relationship between the periodical press and the novels and nonfiction essays included on the syllabus (Hingston). "14 These numbers indicate that we must teach periodical verse in order to give students a complete and complex understanding of Victorian poetry. [...]when I taught a Victorian poetry course in 2012, I made a concerted effort to include periodical literature on my syllabus. [...]students felt comfortable bringing their own interests and backgrounds to their research and occasionally sought sources and topics beyond those suggested by the assignment outline. Students would receive my assistance and help each other troubleshoot immediate problems, thus reinforcing the sense of a collaborative learning environment. [...]I would describe the digital learning outcomes explicitly in the assignment description, for as Beetham suggests, "if such capabilities do not appear in the intended- and assessed-outcomes, learners may not see digital technology as an integral part of their experience.

By making millions of nineteenth-century publications available, digitization projects such as Google Books and British Periodicals I & II have transformed the scholarship and teaching of Victorian literature and its periodical contexts.1 In his conclusion to The Nineteenth-Century Press in the Digital Age, Jim Mussell argues that the "radical shiftin access" marked by the digital turn in periodical studies "cannot but change the way [the field] is conceptualized, privileging certain figures and events while recontextualizing others."2 Moreover, while the development and use of digital resources in the study of periodical literature has changed the way we discuss Victorian literature in the classroom, the rise of the digital humanities has also provided new ways to frame nineteenth-century periodical culture. The collaborative nature of today's digital distribution networks mirrors the rise of the periodical press in the nineteenth century, which created a similar shiftin the production and circulation of knowledge. The mechanization of print and the repeal of the taxes on knowledge (specifically the elimination of stamp duties on newspapers as well as the customs and excise duties on paper) made publishing periodicals more cost effective for publishers.3 In addition, literary texts and criticism were available at relatively affordable prices to a broad cross-section of the Victorian public. As Leighton and Surridge point out, Victorian thinkers such as Thomas Carlyle and John Henry Newman "recognized that in the nineteenth century, knowledge had become the purview of the press, the book an increasingly accessible source of information, and the periodical a major cultural force."4 The collaborative nature of the digital humanities parallels how information was produced and disseminated during the Victorian era; thus, using digital pedagogy contextualizes Victorian periodical culture for students in meaningful ways. Such pedagogical approaches inspire under graduate students to produce original scholarship that bridges the divide between the academy and the public world of the web, thus encouraging them to see their work as relevant within a broader field of knowledge.

For us, the centrality of the periodical press to the production of literature and knowledge in the nineteenth century demands attention in the classroom. However, despite the prominence of periodical studies over the past twenty years, few teaching texts emphasize the periodical origins of the selections they anthologize.5 One way that we have addressed the absence of pedagogical resources for the study of periodical literature is through class trips to archives and assignments that require students to develop a familiarity with both the digital collections of periodical literature (such as the Database of Victorian Periodical Poetry) and the periodicals housed in special collections. Moreover, we have designed assignments that push our third- and fourth-year Victorian literature students (some English majors and some not) even further, asking them to create supplementary resources for the Database of Victorian Periodical Poetry through wiki entries (Ehnes) and requiring students to produce digital resources that highlight the relationship between the periodical press and the novels and nonfiction essays included on the syllabus (Hingston).

Introducing digital technology into the classroom engenders a shiftin pedagogy. As the editors of Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age explain, "Digital technologies have the potential to disrupt norms, challenge assumptions, innovate disciplines and professions, and usher in completely new forms of learning activity."6 Critics studying digital pedagogy- in the humanities and beyond-welcome the role that digitization plays in unsettling classroom power dynamics, which define the professor as the source of knowledge and students as knowledge receptors.7 With the advent and increased accessibility of Web 2.0 platforms, such as wikis, blogs, and social media, comes a greater opportunity, as Laurillard puts it, to "remodel education so that learners can take control of their own learning." 8 Even more significantly, as Winn and Lockwood point out, these platforms enable us "to reconstruct the student as producer and academic as collaborator."9

The two of us came to this topic not as digital humanities scholars or specialists-since we are relatively new to the field-but rather as Victorianists exploring how digital tools can help students participate in scholarship and understand Victorian literary contexts.10 When incorporating digital media in our Victorian literature classrooms, we found that such approaches produced what Winn calls the "culture of sharing," a profound and engaged mode of learning.11 Indeed, this article comes from a similar collaborative space. In the two sections that follow, we each describe our approaches to teaching, refining, and developing our own digital pedagogies while learning from each other's mistakes and successes. Using our own teaching experiences as case studies, we demonstrate how engaging with digital media allows students to participate in building learning communities, blending academic and public dialogue in a way that mirrors the construction of knowledge in Victorian periodical print culture.

Teaching Victorian Poetry in Context: Caley Ehnes

Recent work on Victorian periodical poetry demonstrates that the periodical press played an important part in the literary history of Victorian poetry.12 The numbers confirm the need for this turn towards the study of periodical poetry. For example, as of April 5, 2014, the Database of Victorian Periodical Poetry has indexed 7,608 poems by 2,124 authors in sixteen periodicals. While this particular database focuses primarily on literary periodicals, Andrew Hobbs and Claire Januszewski's research demonstrates that newspapers and working-class publications were also venues for Victorian poetry.13 Hobbs and Januszewski estimate that Victorian newspapers published "something in the order of four million poems . . . during Victoria's reign in England alone."14 These numbers indicate that we must teach periodical verse in order to give students a complete and complex understanding of Victorian poetry. Thus, when I taught a Victorian poetry course in 2012, I made a concerted effort to include periodical literature on my syllabus. I also introduced my students to Victorian periodical culture by taking them on trips to the university archives and by providing links to a variety of digital resources, including Alison Chapman's Victorian Poetry Network (to which I contributed several blog posts based on my research and work with the database) and the Database of Victorian Periodical Poetry (for which I acted as the senior research assistant from September 2010 to July 2013).15 My syllabus for the Victorian poetry course asked students to engage with both material and digital archives, sometimes within a single teaching session. My pedagogical goals for the course were straightforward. I wanted students to conceptualize poetry as something more than an impenetrable series of lines in a scholarly anthology. I wanted them to see poetry as what Aurora Leigh calls a "living art," one that responds to and challenges the poetic and print communities of the nineteenth century.16

My syllabus emphasized the dynamic aspects of Victorian poetry by strategically pairing marginalized periodical poems with those included in our anthology, The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Poetry and Poetic Theory. Simply including these non-canonical poems on the syllabus required my students to rely on a variety of digital resources, including Literature Online and the Yellow Nineties. In order to push my students even further, though, I asked them to locate a periodical poem published during the period covered by our course. To help them navigate the large volume of poetry available in the periodical press, I linked the assignment to the Database of Victorian Periodical Poetry, which had begun a year before under the editorship of Alison Chapman. I suggested that students search for a particular periodical, author, or illustrator from the publications discussed during the semester. Although I encouraged my students to consult bound copies of periodicals after choosing their poems, I also introduced them to online databases, including British Periodicals I & II (ProQuest) and Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals I & II (Gale Cengage). The assignment's emphasis on the periodical press meant that it was not enough for students to simply write a close reading of the poem they chose. They were also required to discuss the poem's broader cultural context and to provide background on the periodical in which the poem appeared.17 This assignment thus asked students to use digital resources while still encouraging them to take advantage of the material archives housed in the library.

To inspire a discussion of the difference between digital and material objects and the information they contain, I encouraged students to engage with digital materials in preparation for work in the archives. For example, early in the term, I asked them to peruse the Forget-Me-Not Hypertextual Archive to get a sense of the annual genre and its composition before they visited special collections to view the 1837 Keepsake, among other annuals. However, as Jim Mussell notes in his work on digital resources and pedagogy, while using the digital as supplementary material rather than as an independent source of inquiry is very tempting, such "resources must be presented as objects of study in their own right and not simply mechanisms for accessing content."18 Indeed, I quickly discovered that simply asking students to look at digital material does not prompt engaging discussions about periodical form. Nor does it lead them to use these sources effectively in their research papers, as Bob Nicholson points out in "Digital Detectives."19 In the future, I will adopt Jim Mussell's suggestions for helping students develop digital literacy by asking them to think critically about the databases they encounter in the course.20 In particular, I will help them consider how carefully curated projects such as the Database of Periodical Poetry raise questions about how the digital resource presents the page, including what information is included and what information is leftout.21 This critical evaluation of digital resources is especially important for the study of literary annuals since their material design, binding, and size determined their critical reception and consumer base. Thinking about the construction of familiar digital forms would also help students grasp how the periodical press influenced the composition, subject matter, and form of Victorian poetry. If, as Mussell contends, the critical evaluation of digital resources "alert[s] students to the ways in which their behaviour-how they use the resource-is constrained by its design," then might it not also help them understand the formal constraints of periodicals, how composition determines readers' experience of the text?22

An open-source database project such as the Database of Victorian Periodical Poetry provides one way to address such questions.23 The apparatus for the database explicitly outlines the editorial decisions made by Chapman and her team, including the type of information they incorporated into the description of each poem.24 The visibility of this information turns the database into a valuable pedagogical tool that introduces students to the kinds of questions that inform the development of digital projects. Asking students to consider the format of an entry in the database prompts them to consider how digital projects interpret and mediate the digital page, determining what information users will be able to access. Once again, the digital becomes a way into the material text, contextualizing the periodical press in terms of familiar media formats and demonstrating how the current technological shifttowards digital textuality is an extension and evolution of nineteenth-century innovations in the production of knowledge.25 Ultimately, the accessibility of nineteenth-century periodicals through these digital projects encourages new scholarly debates about the nature of Victorian poetry and its poetic value, popularity, authorship, and readership. Digital archives also enable students and researchers to read poetry within its original periodical context and the various cultural and artistic networks that defined the poetry of the era.

In addition to expanding my students' understanding of Victorian poetry, I wanted to design a project that would transform them from consumers of information to what Nicholson calls "producers of knowledge."26 With this in mind, I developed a beta wiki project using the WordPress plugin Wiki Lite on Alison Chapman's Victorian Poetry Network.27 The project had three components: a presentation, a draftwiki, and a revised wiki. The three-stage process allowed students to revise their work in light of my comments, which exposed them to the processes of scholarly writing and editing and made student-produced knowledge part of the course syllabus and critical discourse. For example, when the class studied Mary Coleridge's "The Other Side of the Mirror," a group of three students presented summaries of the information from their wikis on Coleridge's biography, her use of the lyric form, and the use of mirrors in Victorian poetry.28

Because the wiki is a new genre of informal academic writing, my evaluation criteria focused on students' understanding of the generic rules (straightforward facts, biographical information, and definitions as opposed to literary analysis), as well as on their ability to produce accurate historical and literary information. I also required that their wikis build upon each other's work wherever possible in order to replicate the miscellaneous yet interconnected nature of the periodical press. This latter aspect of the assignment did not work out as well as I had hoped since the students rarely referenced the work of their peers in their wikis. In the future, I would build more collaboration into the project by asking students to comment on and add to their peers' entries, thereby transforming the project into a true wiki. After all, Google defines a wiki as a "website that allows collaborative editing of its content and structure by its users."29 Just like Victorian authors, students need to consider both their public audience and the expectations of their editor (me) while writing their wikis. Making connections between contemporary and Victorian media formats could produce valuable class discussion of both digital media and the form of the periodical press.

As this assignment was a beta project and my first foray into digital pedagogy, I learned much from its successes and its minor failures. My students responded well to the project, although many had difficulty with the WordPress plugin. Students often required additional one-on-one help (in addition to an in-class tutorial). My subsequent adoption of WordPress as a blogging platform in other courses has had similar results, despite my attempt to include more instruction on how to format posts. My experience confirms Jim Mussell's assertion that we cannot assume our students understand the purpose and underlying principles of digital platforms and technologies just because they are part of the "Google generation."30 Rather, discussions about digital tools should become part of the curriculum. When teaching Victorian periodicals, we might ask students to think about what features structure the periodical press and how such features enable readers to navigate periodical content in particular ways. Of course, sometimes it might be necessary to just switch the platform to something more navigable for students.

Upon the completion of the wiki project described above, Alison Chapman and I discussed how the wiki could become more user-friendly. Wikispaces seemed to offer the best platform for the migration and continuation of the wiki project begun on the Victorian Poetry Network. My initial beta experiment thus grew into the Victorian Poetry, Poetics, and Contexts wiki under Alison Chapman's general editorship (with contributing instructors acting as editors for the duration of their involvement with the wiki). This robust resource of student writing is truly a collaborative project involving instructors from a variety of institutions; indeed, it shows what can happen when those interested in digital pedagogy discuss their projects and are open to collaborative pedagogical spaces.31 Significantly, as Kylee-Anne Hingston addresses below, the development of collaborative digital humanities projects provides a unique opportunity for experiential learning. Through such projects, students develop leadership and interpersonal skills as well as an approachable public writing style-skills that willserve them well when they leave our classrooms to work in academia and beyond.

Teaching Victorian Prose in Context: Kylee-Anne Hingston

As Caley Ehnes has demonstrated above, digital pedagogy produces collaborative learning environments both in the Victorian literature classroom and online. In my applications of digital pedagogy, I am also interested in the possibilities technology provides for engagement with the non-academic community. Geoffrey Rockwell and Stéfan Sinclair argue that the readings and essay assignments in undergraduate courses typically provide professionalization "for only one type of profession-ours [i.e., academia]"; university and college teachers of humanities, they suggest, have a duty "to do more than model academic professionalization."32 Rockwell and Sinclair suggest that the field of digital humanities is poised to provide wider professional acculturation since it "is potentially broader than the academy" due to its primary objective of building "projects in community." 33 In response to conversations with several undergraduate English majors wanting to learn overtly practical skills as part of their course work, I created an assignment in my upper-division Victorian fiction and nonfiction prose courses that provided such skill-building opportunities. In its first incarnation, the assignment trained students to use material archives and special collections, to scan or photograph digital images, and to write for a web audience that included both academics and the general public. By the second term, I also trained students to use a content management system, WordPress, for disseminating their research. The assignment also exposed students to Victorian periodical print culture, helping them situate course readings in specific material and cultural contexts through experiential learning in special collections and library archives.

In the assignment, students signed up at the beginning of the semester for one of the texts we were reading in class and then looked through bound copies of periodicals available at the university library for advertisements, articles, poems, stories, illustrations, or cartoons that shared themes with their chosen course text. As the course readings came up in the reading schedule, students shared their research along with digital images of their original sources, first with the class in a short presentation and then with the public in a short essay on the class website comparing their sources with the course text.34 In the first iteration of this assignment for the mid-Victorian novel course, I marked students' short essays, giving them a two-week opportunity to revise, if they wished, before posting the essays and images on the class website. In the second iteration for the Victorian nonfiction prose course, I made the revision component mandatory and required students to post their projects on the class website themselves.

To prepare students for the assignment, I held a session in the University of Victoria Special Collections to introduce students to the nineteenthcentury periodical as a material object. After giving a lecture on periodicals and print culture, I asked them to look through a selection of the library's periodicals (for example, Punch, Good Words, the Penny Magazine, and All the Year Round) with the specific goal of finding a piece that reflected the Victorian ideal of "progress." By paging through these volumes rather than conducting a keyword search in digitized archives, students were able to immerse themselves in the physicality of Victorian periodicals. This allowed them to think about the format of the periodical press in ways not available through the browse functions of databases; in other words, they were able to see the contents of a periodical as a series of interrelated texts rather than as isolated articles.35 Students could pause over seemingly unrelated items that caught their interest, find related items on facing pages, and discover the theme of progress in images and advertisements, as well as in articles or stories, without relying on keywords specifically related to progress. This archival experience allowed them to encounter the miscellaneity of Victorian periodicals first hand and to understand "that the finished object, which appears to speak to all time, is the work of many people at a specific moment."36 Moreover, the in-class archival research experience helped students see the vast quantity of primary material available, to understand how their projects could contribute to making this material accessible to a wider audience online, and to imagine how their own work on the digital exhibit at the end of the semester would echo the collaboration of the periodical.

Other key learning outcomes of the assignment were for students to engage in current online scholarship, to explore the scholarly and nonscholarly presence of Victorian culture on the web, and, as I suggest above, to consider parallels between twenty-first-century and Victorian forms of information dissemination. I made this outcome plain by noting in the assignment description that just as Victorians knew that technological advances had changed communication, so do present-day academics, who now frequently share their research in a digital format to encourage immediate scholarly conversation and to open that conversation to nonacademic readers. The assignment description then encouraged students to see themselves as participants in online Victorian scholarship.

By including a "Victorian Fun Stuff" forum on a Moodle page to scaffold the digital assignment, I prompted students to carry their exploration beyond the assignment and classroom. On the forum, I posted articles, such as Peter J. Katz's "Dickens, the Digital, and the Doctor," which focuses on the intersection of digital humanities, Victoriana, and Doctor Who, as well as interesting tweets from Victorianists on Twitter, such as those posted by Jaipreet Virdi-Dhesi (@jaivirdi). In turn, students posted items such as a 1998 mock commercial on YouTube advertising "Brontë Sisters Power Dolls" (Lord and Miller) and Adam Gopnik's New Yorker article on the history of atheism and agnosticism, "Bigger than Phil." This forum allowed students to share their insights on Victorian culture as represented in twenty-first-century media whilst also encouraging wider engagement in online Victorian scholarship. Moreover, the blend of the popular and the scholarly in the forum paralleled the miscellaneity of the nineteenth-century periodical press. In one particularly fruitful interaction between the academic and the popular, a student responded to Virdi-Dhesi's tweeted image of a prosthetic forearm from the 1890s37 with an image of a steampunk mechanical arm she had found on Wikipedia.38 As we began our unit on "Victorian Bodies," this conversation between researcher and student-a conversation made possible only through the immediacy of Web 2.0-brought together scholarship and popular culture in a way that allowed students to find a connection between industrialization, machines, and both present-day and Victorian concepts of the body.39

This example demonstrates how using digital media in the Victorian studies classroom empowers students to make critical connections and ask innovative questions on their own-with minimal guidance from instructors. Discussing the "Student as Producer" initiative at the University of Lincoln, Joss Winn and Dean Lockwood argue that digital pedagogy "promotes the values of experimentation, openness and creativity" in the classroom and "engenders equity among academics and students."40 Brett Hirsch refers to this quality as the "hacker ethos" of the digital humanities, which disrupts existing power structures, including the teacher-student relationship."41 Of course, as Teresa Mangum notes, "learning about print culture is a uniquely collaborative experience."42 "Indeed, what form is more collaborative than the periodical itself?," asks Jennifer Phegley in the same issue.43 Truly, the ethos of the periodical press and its knowledgesharing communities has affected the development of Victorian studies as a discipline, which is likewise often collaborative and concerned with making scholarship public, as is reflected in its strong online presence.

As my students presented and published their research throughout the year, a sense of egalitarianism between teacher and student-which was nurtured by making the students active, published researchers-manifested itself both on the website and in the classroom. Through its focus on periodical and digital publication, this assignment emphasized that the classroom and the website were spaces to build collaborative knowledge; this emphasis created an open environment in which both student and instructor were active producers and receivers of knowledge. As a result, students felt comfortable bringing their own interests and backgrounds to their research and occasionally sought sources and topics beyond those suggested by the assignment outline. For example, one student's interest in family history led him to discover "The Ladies of Calvary," an essay on Catholic femininity published in the Irish Monthly in 1883. He compared this piece to one of our course texts, The Manliness of Christ, Thomas Hughes' 1880 broad-church exposition on masculinity.44 I was unfamiliar with the Irish Monthly and was surprised to learn that our library held it. His research thus made him into an expert who was able to answer questions about the magazine and the article. When another student found a Punch cartoon that mocked obesity, a topic not included on the assignment outline, she became interested in the cutting-edge field of fat studies and compared the cartoon to the corpulent Count Fosco from Collins's The Woman in White for her digital exhibit entry.45 She then further developed that research for her final paper discussing male corpulence in The Woman in White and Bleak House. Even when students stayed within the limits of suggested topics and periodicals, their research gave them expert knowledge on their chosen pieces and periodicals, as well as on specialized elements of larger topics. One student, for example, became the class expert on the topic of bloomerism during our unit on Victorian gender and sexuality.46 The public readership of class presentations and exhibits encouraged students-even those who chose to publish under initials or pseudonyms-to take ownership of their scholarship in a way rarely engendered in the typical research essay, which customarily has an audience of one.

Introducing students to the material archives of periodicals and requiring them to approach their research as providers of collaborative knowledge also allowed them to produce excellent scholarly work. In the mid-Victorian novel course, a student's nuanced reading of an 1850 Punch cartoon, "Little Lessons for Little Ladies," contrasted the overt domestic abuse censured in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall to the cartoon's misogynistic tendency to blame female victims of violence.47 Another student gave an erudite reading of an engraving and provided a review of Henry Nelson O'Neil's "Myrrah" (1850) in the Illustrated London News, arguing that the image and its mythic allusions belied the message about feminine sexual purity advanced in the accompanying review.48 In the Victorian nonfiction prose course, I altered the assignment so that students were required to revise their writing, which made them better researchers and editors and thus raised the overall quality of their work. When students chose to support their arguments with non-academic sources, the revision process forced them to substitute more credible references. At times, students' writing improved tremendously as a result of revision, which increased their engagement as researchers and their confidence as writers. Revising for an editor (me) also gave students practical insight into the process of publishing- scholarly and otherwise-and they came to recognize that Web 2.0 could house professional writing as well as the casual and personal writing of the blogging world.

Sometimes, however, it was difficult for students to identify differences between the academic and informal writing styles of Web 2.0. As Helen Beetham points out, while students often capably use social media and Web 2.0, "they do not often understand the rules of academic communication." 49 Students in both courses found it difficult to step outside the formal academic writing suitable for research essays to find a style appropriate for a public, but still academic, platform. Several had difficulty negotiating the balance between an informal tone and scholarly rigour. At times, I too had difficulty knowing how to assess students' online writing-whether I ought to look for overt thesis statements or merely for implied arguments. Should I undertake this assignment again, I would spend more class time early in the semester going over examples of scholarly web writing on websites such as Nineteenth-Century Disability and Prison Voices to review what makes them stylistically successful.50

Familiarizing students with scholarly web writing in this way might also help to overcome another pedagogical obstacle: getting students to read each other's work. While students were excited to see the increasing number of hits the class website received and the comments on and re-tweets of their posts from public readers, they did not seem to see themselves or their classmates as the website's audience. I regularly encouraged the class to read the site, suggesting that doing so would provide a helpful review for the exam or might inspire ideas for the final research paper, but very few did so. In the future, I will incorporate a peer-review component, perhaps having groups of students read and comment on pre-published drafts to further hone their editing skills.

As Caley Ehnes found in her Victorian poetry course, gauging students' technological abilities raised another unexpected complication. Foolishly expecting millennials to be relatively well versed in technology, I pitched the assignment well above the capabilities of some students.51 Of course, as Peter J. Wosh, Cathy Moran Hajo, and Esther Katz point out, the "varying levels of digital expertise that students bring to their work" necessarily makes targeting digital instruction at the most beneficial level a difficult task, with instructors becoming "bogged down in explaining concepts that some students find difficult while others grow impatient with the basic level of instruction."52 My students and I wasted time troubleshooting because I had not ensured that they were sufficiently trained in the use of digital tools. To prevent this misspent time in future courses, I will prepare an inclass activity that requires students to perform basic tasks such as uploading images and text to WordPress. Students would receive my assistance and help each other troubleshoot immediate problems, thus reinforcing the sense of a collaborative learning environment. Moreover, I would describe the digital learning outcomes explicitly in the assignment description, for as Beetham suggests, "if such capabilities do not appear in the intended- and assessed-outcomes, learners may not see digital technology as an integral part of their experience."53

In spite of these minor setbacks, the digital exhibit assignments for both courses met my initial goals: providing practical skills, immersing students in Victorian periodical print culture, and encouraging them to engage in Victorian scholarship online. Even those students who were not technologically skilled managed to troubleshoot through difficulties-malfunctioning library scanners or their own digital illiteracy-to eventually accomplish the necessary tasks. Likewise, students learned to use special collections and archives to do research; they practiced writing and editing scholarly material for a public audience; and they engaged with the materiality of Victorian periodical print culture, including advertisements, articles, stories, illustrations, and poetry. Most importantly, they produced innovative undergraduate scholarship and developed a sense of belonging to the online Victorian scholarly community.

Conclusion

Incorporating digital pedagogy into our Victorian literature courses through online writing assignments allowed us to help students experience the public and collaborative nature of Victorian periodical publishing first hand. Our experiments with digital pedagogy revealed significant connections between the ways students and Victorians composed, disseminated, and circulated information. More importantly, these projects encouraged students to see themselves as producers of cultural knowledge outside of the classroom by locating humanities scholarship within the realm of popular culture and encouraging students to engage with the publishing practices of the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. In his 2013 article describing an innovative and collaborative web-writing assignment, Roger Whitson notes that "most content produced on class websites goes unnoticed unless it is actively promoted by teachers or students, both of whom are often overworked or may not know the complexities of online communication. Posting a blog doesn't have the same resonance as publishing a book did in the nineteenth century, and for this reason, we needed to explore in our course how editorial oversight might help to make work more noticeable." 54 His article describes how the editorial oversight offered by the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy made student writing visible on the internet and taught students about scholarly publishing and about the relationship between technology and narrative. However, while a WordPress blog may not have the "same resonance as publishing a book did in the nineteenth century," its resonance is similar to that of publishing in a periodical in the nineteenth-century. Both were potentially ephemeral, serial, and integrated with accompanying texts. In each case, contributions were small in relation to the mass of information available and thus had the potential to garner public attention or to fall away unnoticed. By harnessing the similarities between twenty-first-century digital media and Victorian periodical print culture in our course and assignment design, we were able to teach our students about the historical and cultural contexts of the literary works they studied while making them stronger writers, editors, and researchers as they participated in the online Victorian scholarly community. The Victorian periodical press allowed both experts and amateurs to publish essays in the same space. Digital tools give our students the same opportunity, making it clear that their voices and critical work matter.

College of the Rockies

University of Victoria

Footnote

NOTES

1. Recent periodicals research, such as Leary's "Googling the Victorians," Latham and Scholes's "The Emergence of Periodical Studies as a Field," and Stauffer's "Digital Scholarship Resources" and "Introduction," has paid particular attention to the effect of this shifton the availability of primary sources. The 2011 forum in Victorian Studies titled "On Evidence and Interpretation in the Digital Age" addresses similar questions.

2. Mussell, Nineteenth-Century Press, 199.

3. For further information on the rise of the mid-Victorian periodical, see Leighton and Surridge's "Introduction," Altick's English Common Reader, and Huett's "Among the Unknown Public."

4. Leighton and Surridge, "Introduction," 11.

5. Notable exceptions include Leighton and Surridge's Broadview Anthology of Victorian Prose and Broadview's collection of facsimile reprint editions, which recognize the original publication contexts of Victorian literature and emphasize the text's original periodical form.

6. Beetham and Sharpe, "Introduction to Rethinking Pedagogy," 4.

7. See Winn's scholarship on the "Student as Producer" program run at the University of Lincoln, which he documents on his website, http://www.josswinn. org.

8. Laurillard, "Foreward to the Second Edition," xvi.

9. Winn and Lockwood, "Student as Producer Is Hacking the University," 220.

10. We have both worked on the Victorian Poetry Network's Database of Victorian Periodical Poetry, Ehnes since 2010 and Hingston since 2012. Ehnes has taken digital humanities courses annually at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) since 2009, and Hingston participated in the digital pedagogy course at the DHSI in 2014. Hingston also contributes to Karen Bourier's digital project, Nineteenth-Century Disability: Cultures & Contexts.

11. Winn, "University as Hackerspace."

12. See, for example, Florence Boos's "Cauld Engle-Cheek," "'Homely Muse' in her Diurnal Setting," and "Queen of the Far-Famed Penny Post"; Andrew Hobbs's "Five Million Poems"; Linda K. Hughes's "What the Wellesley Index LeftOut," "Doubling Enticements to Buy," and Cambridge Introduction to Victorian Poetry; Lorraine Janzen Kooistra's Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing; and Kathryn Ledbetter's British Victorian Women's Periodicals and Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals. For a detailed overview of the current turn towards the periodical press in the study of Victorian poetry, see Chapman and Ehnes, "Introduction."

13. Hobbs and Januszewski, "How Local Newspapers Came to Dominate Victorian Poetry Publishing."

14. Ibid., 65.

15. During my time with the project, I was fortunate to work with the following research assistants and work-study students: Sarah Milligan, Kylee- Anne Hingston, Samantha MacFarlane, Willow Falconer, Chelsea Falconer, Raya Mackenzie, and Heather Snider.

16. Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, 5:221.

17. I directed students to the Waterloo Directory of Victorian Periodicals for this information.

18. Mussell, Nineteenth-Century Press, 175.

19. Nicholson, "Digital Detectives."

20. Flanders and Wernimont similarly comment on the need to develop this kind of digital literacy (though they use different terms), focusing on how feminist approaches to digital projects provide one way of approaching such issues. Flanders and Wernimont, "Feminism in the Age of Digital Archives," 426.

21. A variety of questions can and must be asked of the archive. See Flanders and Wernimont's "Feminism in the Age of Digital Archives," as well as Natalie Houston, Lindsy Lawrence, and April Patrick's "Teaching and Learning," for a discussion of this topic.

22. Mussell, Nineteenth-Century Press, 175.

23. The open-source nature of the Database of Victorian Periodical Poetry and the Periodical Poetry Index make them particularly valuable pedagogical tools for courses on Victorian poetry, especially for those scholars who work at institutions that do not have access to expensive subscription-based services such as ProQuest's British Periodicals I & II.

24. I am grateful for the programming help provided by Martin Holmes and Stewart Arneil from the Humanities Computing and Media Centre at the University of Victoria.

25. Fyfe discusses this parallel in his article "The Random Selection of Victorian New Media."

26. Nicholson, "Digital Detectives."

27. See https://premium.wpmudev.org/project/wordpress-wiki.

28. To read student A. J. Saxby's wiki post, "The Mirror Poem," see https:// victorianpoetrypoeticsandcontext.wikispaces.com/The+Mirror+Poem. This was one of the best wiki posts produced through this assignment.

29. Google, "Define: Wiki."

30. Mussell, Nineteenth-Century Press, 151.

31. For further information about the Victorian Poetry, Poetics, and Contexts wiki, its contributors, and its mission statement, see https://victorianpoetrypoeticsandcontext. wikispaces.com.

32. Rockwell and Sinclair, "Acculturation and the Digital Humanities Community," 179, 178.

33. Ibid., 179, 182.

34. The websites are http://www.dickenstoeliot.wordpress.com, for the fiction course; http://www.victoriancultureandthought.wordpress.com, for the nonfiction prose course.

35. Mussell, Nineteenth-Century Press, 31.

36. Ibid.

37. See Virdi-Dhesi's Twitter post, February 6, 2014, https://twitter.com/jaivirdi/ status/431547208367099905.

38. See Tyrus Flynn's "Steampunk image of author, G. D. Falksen, in an arm mechanism created by Thomas Willeford," photograph, Wikipedia, June 13, 2009, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Steampunk-falksen.jpg.

39. I mediated their communication through Moodle and Twitter, as the student in question did not use Twitter.

40. Winn and Lockwood, "Student as Producer," 220.

41. Hirsch, ": Digital Humanities and the Place of Pedagogy," 15. See, for example, Gold's "Looking for Whitman" for discussion of the successes and difficulties in "hacking" egalitarianism in an innovative multicampus project. See also Winn and Lockwood's "Student as Producer Is Hacking the University."

42. Mangum, "Periodicals, Pedagogy, and Collaboration," 307.

43. Phegley et al., "Collaboration and the Periodical Press," 344.

44. Duben, "Gender Values."

45. Fokkens, "The Mystery and Obesity of Isidor Ottavio Baldassare Fosco." For more information on fat studies, see Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay's Fat Studies Reader.

46. See Eccles, "Contentious Bloomers."

47. Sykes, "Domestic Violence in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Punch."

48. Fulford, "Falling Angels."

49. Beetham, "Designing for Active Learning," 42.

50. Bourier, Nineteenth-Century Disability: Cultures & Contexts, and Rogers, Murray, and Pickersgill, Prison Voices: Crime, Conviction and Confessions, 1700-1900.

51. If only I had read Mussell's "Teaching Nineteenth-Century Periodicals Using Digital Resources" earlier, I would have learned that the "technical competence of the young is routinely overstated" (203).

52. Wosh, Hajo, and Katz, "Teaching Digital Skills," 92.

53. Beetham, "Designing for Active Learning," 35-36.

54. Whitson, "Digital Literary Pedagogy."

References

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Altick, Richard. The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800-1900. 1957. Reprint, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998.

Barrett Browning, Elizabeth. Aurora Leigh. Edited by Margaret Reynolds. New York: Norton, 1996.

Beetham, Helen. "Designing for Active Learning in Technology-Rich Contexts." In Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age: Designing for Twenty-First Century Learning, 2nd ed., edited by Helen Beetham and Rhona Sharpe, 31-48. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis, 2013.

Beetham, Helen, and Rhona Sharpe. "An Introduction to Rethinking Pedagogy." In Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age: Designing for Twenty-First Century Learning, 2nd ed., edited by Helen Beetham and Rhona Sharpe, 1-12. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis, 2013.

Boos, Florence. "Cauld Engle-Cheek: Working Class Women Poets in Victorian Scotland." Victorian Poetry 33, no. 1 (1995): 53-73.

_____. "The 'Homely Muse' in her Diurnal Setting: 'Marie,' Janet Hamilton, and Fanny Forrester in the Periodical Press." Victorian Poetry 39 no. 2 (2001): 255-85.

_____. "Queen of the Far-Famed Penny Post: Ellen Johnston, 'The Factory Girl' and Her Audience." Women's Writing 10, no. 3 (2003): 503-26.

Bourier, Karen, ed. Nineteenth Century Disabilities: Cultures & Contexts. Last modified, 2015. http://www.nineteenthcenturydisability.org/.

Chapman, Alison, ed. Database of Victorian Periodical Poetry. Accessed June 7, 2014. http://web.uvic.ca/~vicpoet/database-of-victorian-periodical-poetry/.

Chapman, Alison, and Caley Ehnes. "Introduction." Victorian Poetry 52, no. 1 (2014): 1-20.

Collins, Thomas J., and Vivienne J. Rundle, eds. The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Poetry and Poetic Theory. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2005.

Duben, Tyson. "Gender Values: How to Be a Protestant Man in London and a Catholic Lady in Belfast." Victorian Culture and Thought: Cultural and Serial Contexts of Victorian Nonfiction Prose. March 27, 2014. Accessed June 9, 2014. https://victoriancultureandthought.wordpress.com/2014/03/27.

Eccles, Cheylyne. "Contentious Bloomers: The Significance of Separate Spheres in John Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies and Punch's 'Something More Apropos of Bloomerism.'" Victorian Culture and Thought: Cultural and Serial Contexts of Victorian Nonfiction Prose. March 31, 2014. Accessed June 10, 2014. https:// victoriancultureandthought.wordpress.com/2014/03/31.

Flanders, Julia, and Jacqueline Wernimont. "Feminism in the Age of Digital Archives: The Woman Writers Project." Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 22, no. 2 (2010): 235-35.

Flynn, Tyrus. "Steampunk-falksen." Photograph. Wikipedia, June 13, 2009. Accessed June 10, 2014. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Steampunk-falksen. jpg.

Fokkens, C. "The Mystery and Obesity of Isidor Ottavio Baldassare Fosco." Dickens to Eliot: Cultural and Serial Contexts of Mid-Victorian Novels. November 25, 2013. Accessed June 9, 2014. https://dickenstoeliot.wordpress. com/2013/11/25.

"Forum: On Evidence and Interpretation in the Digital Age." Victorian Studies 54, no. 1 (2011): 63-94.

Fulford, Halley. "Falling Angels: The Tension between Sin and Femininity in Henry Nelson O'Neil's Painting Myrrha and Charles Dickens' Bleak House." Dickens to Eliot: Cultural and Serial Contexts of Mid-Victorian Novels. Nov. 11, 2013. Accessed June 9, 2014. https://dickenstoeliot.wordpress. com/2013/11/11.

Fyfe, Paul. "The Random Selection of Victorian New Media." Victorian Periodicals Review 42, no. 1 (2009): 1-13.

Gold, Matthew K. "Looking for Whitman: A Multi-Campus Experiment in Digital Pedagogy." In Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles and Politics, edited by Brett D. Hirsch, 151-76. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2012.

Google. "Define:Wiki." Accessed February 6, 2015. https://www.google.ca/.

Gopnik, Adam. "Bigger Than Phil." New Yorker, February 17, 2014. Accessed May 28, 2014. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/02/17/bigger-phil.

Hirsch, Brett D. ": Digital Humanities and the Place of Pedagogy." In Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles and Politics, edited by Brett D. Hirsch, 3-30. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2012.

Hobbs, Andrew. "Five Million Poems, or the Local Press as Poetry Publisher, 1800-1900." Victorian Periodicals Review 45, no. 4 (2012): 488-92.

Hobbs, Andrew, and Claire Januszewski. "How Local Newspapers Came to Dominate Victorian Poetry Publishing." Victorian Poetry 52, no. 1 (2014): 65-87.

Houston, Natalie, Lindsy Lawrence, and April Patrick. "Teaching and Learning with the Periodical Poetry Index." Victorian Periodicals Review 45, no. 2 (2012): 224-27.

Huett, Lorna. "Among the Unknown Public: Household Words, All the Year Round, and the Mass-Market Weekly Periodical in the Mid-Nineteenth Century." In The Lure of Illustration in the Nineteenth Century: Picture and Press, edited by Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor, 128-48. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Hughes, Linda. The Cambridge Introduction to Victorian Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

_____. "Inventing Poetry and Pictorialism in Once a Week: A Magazine of Visual Effects." Victorian Poetry 48, no. 1 (2010): 41-72.

_____. "What the Wellesley LeftOut: Why Poetry Matters to Periodical Studies." Victorian Periodicals Review 40, no. 2 (2007): 91-125.

Katz, Peter. "Dickens, the Digital, and the Doctor." Journal of Victorian Culture Online, October 14, 2013. Accessed June 1, 2014. http://blogs.tandf.co.uk/ jvc/2013/10/14.

Kooistra, Lorraine Janzen. Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing: The Illustrated GiftBook and Victorian Visual Culture, 1855-1875. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011.

Latham, Sean, and Robert Scholes. "The Emergence of Periodical Studies as a Field." PMLA 121, no. 2 (2006): 517-31.

Laurillard, Diana. "Foreward to the Second Edition." In Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age: Designing for Twenty-First Century Learning, 2nd ed., edited by Helen Beetham and Rhona Sharpe, xvi-xviii. New York and London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis, 2013.

Leary, Patrick. "Googling the Victorians." Journal of Victorian Culture. 10, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 72-86.

Ledbetter, Kathryn. British Victorian Women's Periodicals: Beauty, Civilization, and Poetry. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

_____. Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals: Commodities in Context. Burlington: Ashgate, 2007.

Leighton, Mary Elizabeth, and Lisa Surridge. "Introduction." In The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Prose, 1832-1901, edited by Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge, 11-22. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2012.

Lord, Phil, and Chris Miller. "Brontë Sisters Power Dolls." YouTube video clip, 1:30. May 4, 2010. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NKXNThJ610.

Mangum, Teresa. "Periodicals, Pedagogy, and Collaboration." Victorian Periodicals Review 39, no. 4 (2006): 307-8.

"Mary Elizabeth Coleridge." Victorian Poetry, Poetics, and Context, 2012. https://victorianpoetrypoeticsandcontext.wikispaces.com/Mary+Elizabeth+ Coleridge.

Mussell, James. The Nineteenth-Century Press in the Digital Age. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

_____. "Teaching Nineteenth-Century Periodicals Using Digital Resources: Myths and Methods." Victorian Periodicals Review 45, no. 2 (2012): 201-9.

Nicholson, Bob. "Digital Detectives: Bridging the Gap between the Archive and the Classroom." Digital Victorianist (blog), April 12, 2014. http://www.digitalvictorianist. com/2014/04.

Phegley, Jennifer, with Madaline Guilfoil, Kristin Huston, Erin Speck, and Robert Haselwander. "Collaboration and the Periodical Press: Assigning a Group Project to Uncover Victorian Publishing Practices." Victorian Periodicals Review 39, no. 4 (2006): 343-56.

Rockwell, Geoffrey, and Stéfan Sinclair. "Acculturation and the Digital Humanities Community." In Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles and Politics, edited by Brett D. Hirsch, 177-211. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2012.

Rogers, Helen, Katrina Murray, and Katy Pickersgill, eds. Prison Voices: Crime, Conviction and Confessions, 1700-1900, 2013. http://www.prisonvoices.org.

Rothblum, Esther, and Sondra Solovay, eds. The Fat Studies Reader. New York: New York University Press, 2009.

Saxby, A. J. "The Mirror Poem." Victorian Poetry, Poetics, and Context, 2012. http://victorianpoetrypoeticsandcontext.wikispaces.com/The+Mirror+Poem.

Stauffer, Andrew. "Digital Scholarship Resources for the Study of Victorian Literature and Culture." Victorian Literature and Culture 39, no. 1 (2011): 293-303.

_____. "Introduction: Searching Engines, Reading Machines." Victorian Studies 54, no. 1 (2011): 63-68.

Sykes, Clementine. "Domestic Violence in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Punch or the London Charivari." Dickens to Eliot: Cultural and Serial Contexts of Mid-Victorian Novels, October 30, 2013. https://dickenstoeliot.wordpress. com/2013/10/30.

Virdi-Dhesi, Jaipreet (Jaivirdi). "Hello new followers! For you: A creepy steel hand and forearm, c. 1890." Twitter, February 6, 2014. https://twitter.com/ jaivirdi/status/431547208367099905.

Whitson, Roger. "Digital Literary Pedagogy: Teaching Technologies of Reading the Nineteenth-Century." Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy 4 (Fall 2013). http://jitp.commons.gc.cuny.edu/digital-literary-pedagogy-teaching- technologies-of-reading-the-nineteenth-century.

Winn, Joss. "The University as a Hackerspace ('Friction' Conference)." Josswinn. org. May 6, 2014. http://josswinn.org/2014/05/the-university-as-a-hackerspace- friction-conference.

Winn, Joss, and Dean Lockwood. "Student as Producer Is Hacking the University." In Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age: Designing for Twenty-First Century Learning, 2nd ed., edited by Helen Beetham and Rhona Sharpe, 218- 29. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis, 2013.

Wosh, Peter J., Cathy Moran Hajo, and Esther Katz. "Teaching Digital Skills in an Archives and Public History Curriculum." In Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles and Politics, edited by Brett D. Hirsch, 70-96. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2012.