‘Q i-jtb the Raven’: Taking Dirty OCR Seriously

OA Statement

I’m very pleased that an article expanding on my previously-posted conference presentation/blog post, “‘Q i-jtb the Raven’: Taking Dirty OCR Seriously,” appears in the 2017 issue of Book History, which can be found in full via Project Muse. Thanks to Johns Hopkins University Press’ generous OA policies—

You have the following nonexclusive rights…to include the Article in your own personal or departmental institutional database or on-line site…

—I am able to make the article available here. The Book History version thickens the core argument of the original talk and substantially expands its critical bibliography of the November 28, 1849 Lewisburg Chronicle, and the West Branch Farmer and its investigations into the long history behind Chronicling America.

Related Work

Given the workings of academic publishing, a number of articles have come out since I submitted the final draft of “Q i-jtb the Raven” to Book History that are directly pertinent to my argument and would, given different timing, be cited and discussed in it. I would call particular attention to two pieces published in Victorian Periodicals Review, Katherine Bode’s “Fictional Systems: Mass-Digitization, Network Analysis, and Nineteenth-Century Australian Newspapers” (VPR 50.1, Spring 2017) and Paul Fyfe’s “An Archaeology of Victorian Newspapers” (VPR 49.4, Winter 2016) and especially to Bode’s “The Equivalence of ‘Close’ and ‘Distant’ Reading; Or, Towards a New Object for Data-Rich Literary History” (Modern Language Quarterly, December 2017), which Bode also makes available on her website. If you find the argument in “Q i-jtb the Raven” interesting or useful, you will benefit from Bode’s and Fyfe’s work as well.

Suggested Citation

Ryan Cordell, “‘Q i-jtb the Raven’: Taking Dirty OCR Seriously,” Book History 20 (2017), 188-225, via http://ryancordell.org/research/qijtb-the-raven/.

‘Q i-jtb the Raven’ in Book History