Thinking Machines: Constructing Knowledge in the Victorian Periodical Press, 1840-1860

知识的历史条件是什么？我们用来书写和分享知识的结构如何塑造我们的思维方式？在1830-1860年期间，期刊出版社的迅速发展创造了新的文本类型、读者群体和阅读方式，并推动了这一时期广泛的社会、经济和政治变革。这种新的机械化的印刷文化是如何构建和组织它所展示的知识的？赋予发展的意义和价值，例如蒸汽活塞或改革后的邮政系统，并不是与生俱来的或不可避免的，而是植根于定期出版的话语实践的结果。因此，对文本实践的理解加深了我们对社会变革关键驱动因素的理解。这个项目的主要目标是调查知识是如何被19世纪新兴的印刷文化构建的，为什么，以及产生了什么影响。该项目借鉴最新的理论，利用直到最近的档案数字化之前不可能进行的研究规模，将考虑物理和概念形式，以揭示知识是如何在局部的、话语的和系统的层面上构建的。事实上，规模问题已经成为期刊学术领域的核心问题，因为数字化使研究人员能够跟踪大型数据集中的关键字和概念。这就产生了“远距离阅读”(相对于传统的“近距离阅读”)等新方法，而数字人文领域是一个蓬勃发展的研究领域。拟议的项目旨在使用我在我早期的专著项目《十九世纪英国的视觉话语》(PalGrave，2018)中成功使用的论述方法，但对范围问题有了新的关注。通过以对个别文本和杂志/报纸问题的近距离观察开始分析，然后逐渐扩大到考虑出版运营、出版物之间的关系，并最终考虑出版系统、市场、读者和商业利益，该项目将利用近距离和远距离阅读技术的创新组合，提供基于历史细节细节的广泛视角。这种方法符合两个目标中的第二个目标，即改进现有方法或开发新方法，以更充分地利用数字学术的优势，同时保留传统史学的好处。除了其雄心勃勃的概念范围外，该项目还创新地使用档案研究来回答有关知识结构的关键问题，该项目将对维多利亚时代的期刊研究做出重大贡献，并将对参与历史或文本学术的人文学者具有更广泛的价值。

What are the historical conditions of knowledge? How do the structures we use to write and share knowledge shape the way we think? In the period 1830-1860, the rapid growth of the periodical press created new kinds of texts, readerships, and ways of reading, and was a driving force in the period's wide-reaching social, economic, and political changes. How did this newly mechanised print culture construct and organise the knowledge it presented? The meanings and values ascribed to developments such as, for example, the steam piston or the reformed postal system, were not innate or inevitable but resulted from discursive practices rooted in the periodical press. Understanding textual practices therefore deepens our understanding of key drivers of social change. The primary objective of this project is to investigate how, why, and to what effect, knowledge was constructed by the newly developed print culture of the nineteenth century.Drawing on recent theory and utilising a scale of study that was impossible until the recent digitisation of archives, the project will consider both physical and conceptual forms, to uncover how knowledge was constructed at localised, discursive, and systemic levels. Indeed, the question of scale has become central to the field of periodicals scholarship as digitisation has allowed researchers to track keywords and concepts across large datasets. This has resulted in new methods such as "distant reading" (as opposed to traditional "close reading"), and the field of digital humanities is a thriving research area. The proposed project aims to use the discursive method I successfully employed in my earlier monograph project, Discourses of Vision in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Palgrave, 2018), but with a new attention to the issue of scope. By beginning the analysis with a close-up view of individual texts and magazine/newspaper issues, and then gradually widening to consider publication runs, inter-publication relations, and eventually publication systems, markets, readerships, and commercial interests, the project will utilise an innovative combination of both close and distant reading techniques, to offer a broad view grounded in the particulars of historical detail. Such an approach speaks to the second of the two objectives, which is to refine existing methods or develop new ones to more fully leverage the advantages of digital scholarship while retaining the benefits of traditional historiography. With its innovative use of archival research to answer key questions about knowledge construction alongside its ambitious conceptual scope, the project will make a substantial contribution to Victorian periodical studies and will be of wider value to scholars across the humanities who are involved in historical or textual scholarship.