Fyfe 2024
Fyfe, Paul. Digital Victorians: From Nineteenth-Century Media to Digital Humanities. Stanford UP, 2024.
Wandering between two worlds, caught between the best and worst of times, the Victorians perceived themselves in the middle of an epochal transition, including to the ways they depicted and communicated these changes.
The Victorian moment of new media is also our moment. The last few decades have brought a similar sense of living through an unprece- dented age of digital transformation, for better and worse.
Among the many contexts in which we can trace a nineteenth-century inheritance—the lasting schisms of empire, climate crisis, or even historical thinking as such—this book is especially interested in the contemporary legacy of Victorian new media. This is not simply because nineteenth-century inventions like the telegraph helped establish the technologies and infrastructure for the digital present—which, intriguingly, they did. Instead, the nine- teenth century sets the conceptual terms we still use to understand new media and our relationships to it. Our very sense of technological newness has a Victorian history.
If we recognize digital media in the Victorian past, that does not commit us to valorizing the present or excluding other forms of historical knowledge. Making the Victorians “digital” may actually help resist the narratives of historical uniqueness that “new media” enables, then as well as now. It gives us tools to know the past and ourselves differently.
…looking back, the history of the digital present extends to nineteenth-century encounters with media in transition; looking forward, this history re- frames our own contemporary relationships with the digital, especially in contexts of the materials, interpretive practices, and professional landscape of the …
…this book shifts from the gen- eralized category of the “digital” to the emergence of “digital human- ities” (DH) as a notably self-conscious discourse about what happens to text, writing, communication, culture, and work amid significant media shift—questions that had intensely preoccupied the Victori- ans as well…
Like “new media,” DH has a longer and more complex history than typically gets acknowledged. This book finds an alternative one in nineteenth-century encounters with its new media.
One of the advantages of studying the Victorians is we can recognize genealogies of our own knowledge practices before their disciplinary enclosure and analyze how those divisions took hold from their “undisciplined culture” to ours.
If the Victorians were already digital, they might help us envision a more encompassing field or alternative futures for digital scholarship now.
Digital Victorians is not (quite) a media history, but a history of interpretive attitudes about media in transition, for which writing and literature—broadly construed—furnish such useful evidence.
Digital Victorians argues for the substantial explanatory power of Victorian literature for thinking about the digital age and reconfigu- ration of humanities practices within it.
With its transhistorical corre- spondence, this book offers a capacious and interdisciplinary approach to studying new media, including attention to the materiality of trans- mission, the ethics of data, the historiography of digital materials and methods, and the origins of academic fields.
Nunberg, James Gleick, and Toni Weller all locate the emergence of a modern concept of information at this time: “it was during the nineteenth century that the overt recog- nition and expectation of information that is characteristic of our own age first became evident.”
I rehearse just a few of these arguments to suggest how strongly the nineteenth-century’s “age of transition” resonates with scholars— especially those guided by a constellation of terms including informa- tion, communication, technology, and media. They also reveal a desire to recognize nineteenth-century developments as precursors to our own, as if the Victorian age transitions directly to the present.
Fans and scholars alike are reclaiming the Victorian era in the present, as it helps stabilize or decode the disruptions of digital culture.
In this book, I am as interested to study this sense of the digital present as its potential origins in the Victorian past. Both are historical conditions defined significantly by media in transition, whose “newness” has less to do with technological invention and more to do with social, cultural, and professional structures in flux.
However, though such cross-disciplinary conversations have been generative, the periodization and geographical focus of liter- ary scholarship (“Victorian studies”) does not neatly align with media history.
For these reasons and more, literary scholars need to take care in claiming media studies under our auspice, or assuming the Page 10
In short, DH is the academy’s new media encounter.
It makes sense that “What is DH?” is an endlessly asked and unanswerable question. The question is its own answer, as DH is a metadiscourse that has prompted the humanities to vigorously reassess its purview.
Almost by definition, new media has been an engine of presentist think- ing, seeming neatly to distinguish breaks between technological eras.
Digital Victorians joins this conversation while adding other dimensions to it, especially the perspectives of media historians and communication scholars.
Taken together, they track the establishment of something like digital humanities in the nineteenth century, generalized as the relationship of writing, publishing, and reading to conspicuous changes in the Victorians’ sociotechnical land- scape, which I will describe in terms of media shift.
In sum, the book traces the establishment of Victorian digitality, identifies its legacies in the present, and assesses the problems and opportunities of that strange inheritance.
For that reason, I do not track specific technologies back to their uncanny Victorian precursors but try to demonstrate corresponding moments in which their significance was negotiated.
Information’s disappearing act is not a property of communications technology. It is an effect of the discourse around communications technology in which journalistic writings and literary texts play vital roles. Literature, however you define it, does not stand outside media history, nor is literature merely conveyed through media like an inert substance. Rather, literature shapes the habits of mind and rhetorical frames by which technologies come to exist and function.
This chapter locates an origin myth for the disembodiment of information in nineteenth-century reactions to landmark shifts in networked communications media, including the demise of the horse- drawn mail coach, its replacement by rail, the industrialization of print, and the transatlantic telegraph.
Interestingly, that does not happen simply by denying the body or ignoring the material. It paradoxically results from trying to under- stand telecommunications through the body—at least through nor- mative bodies defined and delimited by the senses.
Ultimately, I argue that dis- course around nineteenth-century media offers an origin of the myth of disembodied information as well as an emerging counter discourse of what Peters calls “infrastructuralism.” 13Like the internet train ar- riving in the pre…
For De Quincey, affect resolves the problem of how things are connected.
If the materiality of the medium can only be understood if we see, touch, taste it, we have introduced physiological and anthropocentric biases that make telecommunica- tions media seem alien, other, “quasi-physical” or beyond bodies, like the creature whose eloquence we understand but whose monstrous form we shun. And that estrangement will only grow.
As they industrial- ized, newspapers tried to distinguish themselves in a crowded field by celebrating their own technical accomplishments, whether in terms of printing speeds, copies printed, machines used, images made, or distances traveled. Yet even when showcasing their own production, newspapers mystified these processes for readers.
…regardless of the technology or their attitudes, they both make the same rhetorical moves. They each create biomorphic hybrids; they idealize a connective technology; they naturalize its functions; and they make alien or unknowable those di- mensions that exceed what we can see and feel. In each case, we’re left with a fantasy about frictionless mediation, about the sublime trans- mission of messages.
Perhaps no other engine of nineteenth-century media did as much as the newspaper to drive the myth of disembodied information as well as to showcase its own logistics and production. That performance played again and again as nineteenth-century periodicals celebrated their medial breakthroughs. The patterns of disintermediation are certainly legible in terms of Marxist critique, offering examples of how capital would obscure the conditions of its own production and fetishize infor- mation as a commodity on its own. However, newspapers created the commodity value of information by making a show of how they printed and distributed their goods. If newspapers obscured some aspects of their production in economic terms, they celebrated the materials, ma- chines, and movement as part of what was new about news. Turning the newspaper into a commodity also meant showcasing to readers how it was made.
Instead, the newspaper press shows the contest among discourses of mediation, or the blend of what now seem like incommensurate ideas.
Smits uses the story of the Queen’s speech to claim that national news was not merely a telegraphic or technological phenomenon, as scholars sometimes claim. In fact, the story emphasizes the opposite of telegraphic disembodiment: the papers, vehicles, and geographic traverse all reinforce readers’ sense of broader connectedness.
The Morning Post, like the W. H. Smith Company, like The Times and the Illustrated London News, all insisted that readers recog- nize the material history and delivery infrastructure that made them unique.
The challenge for media history is to move beyond the frameworks for understanding communications that nineteenth-century writers largely defined. We need to develop the disposition to the infrastruc- tures, materials, and environments the Victorians conspired to erase.
…ary structures of power evolve into “a continuous set of cybernetic systems, financial incentives, and monitoring techniques molded to each individual subject.” 79In other words, networked disem- bodiment is a trap, baited with the promise of connectivity.
This chapter has suggested that the impulse to see and to feel in networked communications only further divorces information from its body, implying that the medium, even so nakedly encountered, carries “nothing.” So disconnected from what he can sensuousl…
The significance of the internet comes less from Blum than from the literary tropes he imports, tropes that paradoxically render invisible the cultural infrastructure that a book like Tubes was sup- posed to reveal.
This chapter argues how this tangle of preoccupations—as illuminated by writers including George Eliot, George du Maurier, psychical researchers, jour- nalists, and legal scholars—becomes the foundation for an emerging discourse of data ethics.
… of information.” 13The Lifted Veil dramatizes the bound- ary problems of nineteenth-century reprographic, electromechanical, and psychical mediums, sometimes explicitly referenced in the text, but everywhere inferred in Latimer’s hypersensitive mediation.
… moments of ignorance like cherishing “the last pains in a paralysed limb.” His “strange disease” turns his telepathy into teleparalysis; he is rendered completely inef- fectual by the very phenomenon of being connected to others, flooded with impressions.
Latimer suffers less from “superadded” connections than from the supersession of a normal mind by a technologized hyperconsciousness. Latimer has a networked sensorium. And it produces the very opposite of sympathy.
Rather, the threat lies within the very ideology of networked communication: an assumption that such networks establish connections at all, or that they produce knowable things.
Instead, The Lifted Veil is haunted by the transformation of sociality that attends technologized communication, imagining the consequences in terms we are now well equipped to recognize.
…ms of information, are uncannily familiar: in Birkerts’s terms, a “cognitive and moral pa- ralysis.” 49This discourse has fully reanimated the terms of Eliot’s dis- content in The Lifted Veil. I would even argue that such critiques verge on a gothic genre.
In promoting empathy, Turkle retreads Victorian nostalgia for a sense of connectedness it never actually felt, and extends its “empathic gaze” built on racial subjection.
…connection of souls through the ether, we now understand in a far more mundane, though almost equally mystified, context as data capture and surveillance, or what the Defense Advanced Research Proj- ects Agency (DARPA) once menacingly called “Total Informational Awareness.”
Babbage imagines the durability of sound waves inscribed on the air and potentially decodable by a supreme mathematical intel- ligence: “The air itself is one vast library, on whose pages are for ever written all that man has ever said or woman whispered.” For Babbage, any natural medium permanently records our words and deeds: “the atmosphere . . . the waters, and the solid materials of the globe, bear equally enduring testimony of the acts we have committed.”
Victorian spiritualism lives on in discourse about our digital doubles, the ghosts in the machine summoned by our unwitting passage through the data-collecting world.
This goes beyond theories of immediacy to a fantasy of universal storage, con- nected cognition, and lossless recall any time in the future. Memory is not only ambient, but permanent.
The fantasy of endlessly extensible, ever-enduring memory gets constructed in the late nineteenth century in the context of recording media, spiritualism, and emerging psychiatric discourse. This model of the mind extends through twentieth-century fantasies of total storage, many of which seized on the computer as a new mechanism to explain it.
The faith in perpetual digital memory actually produces its opposite: a lack of awareness, concern, and investment to curate pre- carious digital materials for even the near future.
Be- tween a whole historical era and the embarrassing lifespan of software, between lived experience and the picoseconds of arcane computational processes, between the horizons of death and permanent digital after- lives: the digital has warped the relationship of memory and time.
Digital memory blurs many of the same ontological boundaries that Victorian spiritualists and psychologists were attempting to theorize.
I have shown examples of how nineteenth-century literature modeled these questions in its own era, as well as some of the problematic ways that commentary about con- nectedness and digital memory have redeployed nineteenth-century tropes. These commentators are right to look to the past for inspiration, though wrong to normalize its politics, dreams of disintermediation, or salutary experiences of deep reading. Victorian literature can offer a genealogy of data privacy and ethics—but rooted instead in its ambiv- alences about what we can know and how…
when it is least omniscient, and most wrong.” 128This does not mean cultivating ignorance about other people, but honoring, even revering, the value of limited social knowledge. Eliot’s ethics might depend on what people ought not to know about each other.
They are narratives shaped by a “pathology of information” and the genres that have emerged to assess it. Faced with this condition, nar- rative tries to compensate for the otherwise unanswerable complexity and uncertainty of a social existence overshadowed by its own data. This patterns both Victorian spiritualism and its desacralized coun- terpart, the anxious discourse around digital memory.
In the Cage offers a prescient glimpse of contemporary problems in humanities research: how to manage, read, and interpret texts at scale, specifically by counting words, or even by training machines to do so.
I argue that these nineteenth-century contexts offer al- ternative genealogies of distant reading and machine learning without capitulating to their rhetoric. From telegraphers and speed-reading secretaries to gendered artificial intelligence agents and clickworkers, AI has relied on human labor it either marginalizes or renders invi…
It signals the late Victorian origins of distant reading, as much a methodology as an argument about how interpretive reading can or should adapt to technological change.
In the Cage is a parable about alienated labor in the information age.
The telegrapher is not allowed to understand or interact with what she transmits. So she transgresses by imagining the significance of trans- mitted words beyond the dictionary, reconstructing the relations and subtexts they do not disclose or intentionally distort and transcending her station to join the “large and complicated game” of high-society int…
From a more contemporary perspective, these are stories about experimental reading methods in an era of unprecedented textual scale. They help show when quantitative modes of textual interpreta- tion became possible, perhaps even necessary, and hotly contested.
Rather, her imaginative labor cannot be valued while men like James seek to claim literary critical authority. In the Cage forcibly teaches the telegrapher what real reading is supposed to look like.
Ironically, to resist the technologizing of reading, this discourse technologized women’s bodies and work—a pattern that extends from Victorian telecommunications to recent representations of AI.
Looking further back, we can see how the origins of distant reading entangle with major changes in the late nineteenth- century understanding of reading as itself a technical process. In this context, counting words shifts to a predictive intelligence that speeds up reading. Its legacy is a category of AI called machine learning; its lesson is resisting the problematic erasures by which AI pretends it is artificial.
Amid turn-of-the-century developments in physiological studies of eye movement and speed reading pedagogies, we can see the stirrings of the predictive analytics that machine learning would formalize, and how it spurred sometimes anxious, sometimes utopian speculation about what it might facilitate.
…, through the gap left in the high lattice.” The small window regulates the exchange of words; the cage itself becomes a space of controlled symbol processing, the site of James’s fictional experiment about how much the telegrapher can read and comprehend.
From association to anticipation, from training to predictive un- derstanding. Here too, we see the underappreciated talents of James’s telegraphist. She embodies an approach to learning characterized by sifting data, finding patterns, and inferring particulars.
The more examples she trains on, the better she gets at decoding and ultimately predicting their exchanges:
Behind the screen, the telegraphist is also an operator within that system, developing her own techniques for interpreting its signals. If she is a cyborg, she is also an early version of a “machine learner.” If the telegraphist is a distant reader avant la lettre, she also represents an early version of a machine reader that the fin de siècle knew by other names.
But recovering the telegraphist as a machine reader may ironically help restore the human dimensions of AI, and even present an alternative approach to computational creativity.
In the Cage blames romance novels and naivete as the telegraphist’s greatest influences as a reader, linking her to a tradition of endangered and dangerous women readers as long as the novel itself. But projecting
the telegraphist’s reading strategies forward suggests a different gene- alogy in which the danger of women readers was resolved by excluding them entirely from the machinic intelligence they powered.
With the advent of language models and generative transformers, trained to predict what words should follow an initial prompt, we are again wrestling with complicated questions of occluded labor, the veracity of output, and computational creativity. Who is the author of a text partly gen- erated by a machine? Can we accept machine-generated language as knowledge? Whose words and work has it absorbed, and how are its outputs valued?
This chapter recasts The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde as a
nightmare allegory of late nineteenth-century media shift. Holographs, writing, books, and reading all offer Stevenson a proxy language for the media theory he cannot yet articulate: specifically, a theory of media transformation or remediation.
Sometimes latent, sometimes surfaced in critiques of the “dark side of the digital humanities,” the widespread unease with DH replays late Victorian concerns about the professional and philosophical consequences of media shift, including the authority of text, primacy of narrative, aesthetic reproducibility, erosion of professional elites, and violation of disciplinary boundaries and humanistic values.
Rather, I want to suggest how Stevenson consolidated a latent awareness of late nineteenth-century media shift into an en- during characterological template, continuing to influence the way we argue now.
Jekyll’s goals align with the stricter definition of remediation from Bolter and Grusin. Remediation is not simply a state change from one medium to another: it describes media’s pursuit of direct experience (immediacy) and the production of its opposite, an awareness of the obstructing body of any new medium (hypermediacy). 9So Mr. Hyde offers a new body for the immediate pursuit of Jekyll’s desires, yet Hyde unsettles the novel’s other characters with the hypervisible yet unde- finable aberration of that body.
On the one hand, so to speak, Jekyll and Hyde share an iden- tical script; on the other; they possess radically different embodiments. How can this warped mechanism produce the same writing? The para- dox of hands in Jekyll and Hyde underscores its larger question: can two dramatically different mediums generate a consistent message?
When new communications technologies were named as forms of writing (e.g., telegraphy, photog- raphy, phonography), their yet-unfamiliar media was granted writing’s accepted terms of symbolic inscription. This reinforced an ideologi- cal continuity between writing and authorship, or between hand and hand, that new media actually destabilized.
Stevenson cannot yet name or resolve his media problem, so he shifts it to another domain: the contests over professional forms of writ- ing and reading that preoccupied Stevenson (and many others) in the 1880s.
The novel casts its professional contest nominally between doctors—though we never really see their medi- cal practice. Instead, Jekyll and Hyde consistently stages the unlikely drama of reading. Time and again, the novel presents scenes of textual blasphemy and professionally authenticated forms of reading. While this strategy creates narrative suspense, it also resolves the threats of a blasphemous textual practice premised on quantification, experiment, and replication.
The bodily transformation from Jekyll to Hyde serves as a metaphor- ical warning about the commercialization of writing by a multimodal mass media at the fin de siècle.
Arguably, the nov- el’s implicit drama of remediation compelled its own adaptation time and again, from theatrical stagings to early phonographic recordings and audiobooks and films. Stevenson’s story gives these adaptations a self-reflexive charge, becoming popular any time its questions about media transformation emerge anew. These moments show the enduring appeal of Jekyll and Hyde and its gothic tropes as a framework for media shift and its challenges to cultural authority.
Jekyll and Hyde tends to appear at intervals when a technological mass medium has not yet been fully mechanized, when its protocols and representational claims are still being negotiated. It appears when a communications technol- ogy is itself transforming into a medium, including the transformation of women’s labor into mechanized forms. At these moments, Jekyll and Hyde becomes doubly useful: one, as a narrative framework for stabiliz- ing the curiosities and uncertainties about a new medium; and two, as a moralizing framework for qualifying the right behavior, social norms, and professional boundaries that medium seems to unsettle.
I am less interested in the substance of critiques like Birkerts’s than the forms and metaphors they often employ. What we find is a familiar fiction of displacement, disfigurement, and degeneration inherited from the nineteenth cen- tury.
Whether adapted directly or lurking in the shadows, Jekyll and Hyde uncannily appears at moments of media shift, especially those that unsettle the cultural authority of legacy media and its credentialed in- terpreters.
I do not want to insist that Stevenson’s novella establishes some master pattern; rather, Jekyll and Hyde cues us to look for novelistic adaptations in moments when new media unset- tles professional norms.
In a way, the novel makes monstrous the idea of experimental replication, which aligns with contemporary skepticism about an em- pirical approach to the literary arts.
The audacity of Jekyll’s experiment comes in trying to devise quantitative recipes for transcendental subjects. It is with similar audacity that Andrew Piper and Matt Erlin propose the quantitative studies of culture: “the most important, discipline- cha…
While tempted, I do not really mean to match these stories point for point, but to show more generally how Stevenson framed monstrosity in a context of debates about media and a transforming professional literary sphere, and, in turn, to illustrate how debates about DH adapt that gothic template to represent the con- sequences of media shift for humanities labor.
At the panel and afterward, many DHers complained that they did not recognize themselves in the grim characterizations of their work. But those characterizations, along with the divisions of us/ them we/they, do not necessarily come from careful analysis of digital scholarly practice. They emerge from preexisting plots that give them shape and which have consistently proved useful in framing the profes- sional repercussions of media shift.
T H E P E R I O D I C A L P R ESS W A S T H E engine of the Victorian’s new print media and its resulting sense of information overload.
Here in the last, I want to demonstrate how digitization forgets its own temporal legacies and material dependencies—as well as why and how we might need to reconstruct what it erases in the interval.
What we call “digitization” is only the nearest link of a tangled chain of remediation, institutional decisions, historical contingencies, and global actors far beyond the Victorian purview.
Ultimately, I suggest how studying Victorian texts against the longue durée of their mediation reveals the lasting impacts of earlier sociotechnical frameworks, invisible labor, and global exchange within the research objects and professional organizations of contemporary scholarship.
In physics, sublimation occurs when substances skip a physical state change, as when dry ice goes directly from solid to gas without an intermediate liquid stage. It is a useful metaphor for digital resources, which can seem to erase any intermediary state between source object and digital surrogate in the cloud.
…the legacy and functionality of digital scholarly resources also deeply depend on something else: “paradata.” Loosely defined, “paradata” means the procedural contexts, workflows, and in- tellectual capital generated by groups throughout a project’s lifecycle.19 Paradata might include commentary, rationale, process notes, and re- cords of decisions about projects capturing what its participants chose to include or exclud…
…ssion of newspapers through the evolving architectures of scholarly resources, beginning with the accessioning of newsprint by the British Museum in 1822. That date marks the first systematic and institutional attempt to collect British newspapers as such.
Newspaper accessions were perennially troubled by the museum’s storage space and the expense of binding them into volumes.
In 1905, the storage crisis resulted in the construction of the muse- um’s newspaper repository at Colindale (which was filled within twenty years) and the subsequent construction of the British Museum News- paper Library in 1932.
Nevertheless, it is an argument worth considering—that twentieth-century microfilms are not the acciden- tal intermediaries for commercial digital objects but their institutional precondition.
While the library’s print collection of nineteenth-century newspapers turned out to be in relatively good shape—with only 2 percent unfit for its new Zeutschel microfilm cameras—its microfilm collection of newspapers had prob- lems, largely developed on acetate rolls subject to acidic decay. So the BL decided to digitize newspapers by, whenever necessary, first making new microfilms from print copies. This would standardize its digital production and update its microfilm collections to National Preser- vation Standards.
As the BL logged pages for the JISC I and JISC II digitization projects, they were often improving the library’s catalog information about their originals, whose existence in print was frequently unknown or otherwise complicated by variously timed or regionally distributed editions. (…
Thus, digitization ironically regenerates the memory of nineteenth-century newspapers as preserved in other storage media, including stabilized paper as well as new microfilm.
Gale was soon using its own workflows and pro- posing additional requirements such as using subject categories for articles (with twenty-six options). 96These decisions consolidate in a master file, called the document type definition (DTD), a set of rules that all the project’s XML files must obey. In simpler terms, it consti- tutes the set of editorially accepted categories—for example, subjects, genres, and document features—within a digital collection. Establish- ing these parameters was apparently the most contentious aspect of the project, as developers and scholars attempted to model the staggering heterogeneity of formats and content across a century of periodical publishing.
That switch shows how digitization is not a one-time process but a transformation that occurs within the evolving circumstances of libraries, publishers, and users, and gets reshaped by different sets of institutional values and technical specifications.
Instead, I argue that Victorian studies is inextricably related to the archives it helped to envision and the media forms that defined them.
…the field forms in concert with the regeneration of its archives in new me- diums, as part of a broader project of record keeping, at the time being redefined by micropublishing and the computerization of bibliographic records. These media forms were thoroughly exercised on nineteenth- century periodicals and newspapers whose scale and informational complexity pushed (and continues to push) the early adoption of digital methods, and the reorganization of scholarly labor around indexing and information retrieval…
Victorian periodical studies only becomes possible in an age of micro- publishing and early computerization.
In a way, Victorian studies may owe less to grand claims about its historical sig- nificance than to the everyday labor of listing its texts, made possible by twentieth-century tools.
…w, the concepts we use to study historical texts cannot be separated from the material histories of how they were collected, remediated, and accessed. Nor can those material histories be separated from the social and schol- arly reorganization they occasion, and in which researchers continue to practi…
In various forms of “engaged presentism,” we can imbue the past with the present to learn something new about each. 3The lesson is not simply that what is new is old. Seen through anachronism or in novel genealogies, what’s new looks differ- ent, open to scrutiny and potentially to reform.
Nineteenth-century media offers a long history of imagining technological newness, its consequences for cultural production, and the shifting roles of its casual and professional interpreters.
A combination of factors made nineteenth-century printed materials amenable to digitize and assemble into searchable collections. First, these materials appear historically in a sweet spot between the stan- dardization of English language orthography and the moving wall of copyright restrictions.
If punch card computing projects were them- selves descendants of Jacquard looms and Babbage and Lovelace’s An- alytical Engine, so data-driven humanities research might owe much to the quantitative mindset and statistical records of the nineteenth century.