Dr. Clare Horrocks gives a talk on 'Enhancing Research Utilising Digital Resources' at CRAL

Dr. Clare Horrocks

Dr. Clare Horrocks (Liverpool John Moores University) is giving a talk on 'Enhancing Research Utilising Digital Resources: Re-examining William Makepeace Thackeray’s role on the Staff of Punch Magazine 1844 - 1854'.
 
Clare is the Project Lead for the Punch and the Victorian Periodical Press Resource, LJMU Special Collections and Advisory Editor for Gale Cengage – Punch Historical Archive 1841 - 1992.

The talk takes place on Tuesday, 18 November 11.00 – 12.30 in Trent A35.

Abstract:

William Makepeace Thackeray’s commitment to periodical writing is one of the most distinctive aspects of his literary legacy.  He wrote regularly for a variety of different publications, in Britain and abroad. However, as this paper will demonstrate, the magazine that he was most committed to was Punch, contributing illustrations and satirical pieces of wit and humour from 1842 to 1854.  Through an analysis of the Punch contributor ledgers, currently part of a digitisation project at Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU),CLICK this paper seeks to go beyond the more familiar work of Thackeray such as The Snobs of England (1846 – 47), to examine the true range of his work for Punch.  Using the relatively neglected Punch contributor ledgers, I will consider how advancements in digital archiving can enhance author studies, to reveal previously unstudied material, moving on to analyse wider debates about the benefits of digitisation and the implications that this may have for appreciating prolific, yet comparatively neglected, writers and artists like Thackeray.  The final part of the paper will consider how the data returned from digital repositories can be sorted and displayed. By applying heuristics to the data on a known topic, within given parameters, researchers can go on to more readily formulate search patterns to discover previously undetected relationships in the data in order to reappraise their subject.