The “Unwieldy” Archive, a Student Reaction to Genius For Sale!
May 10, 2014
by Diana Greenwald | Filed in: Conferences
Some people who attended Genius for Sale! have written and will be writing blog posts responding to the conference and the presentations given there. Dr. Katherine Bowers’ (University of Cambridge) real-time tweets were the first feedback on the conference.
The first student blog post comes from Teja Varma Puspati, a second-year doctoral candidate at Wolfson College:
For me, a second-year D.Phil student in English, the most exciting aspect of the conference was that it demonstrated how certain methodological tools, particularly those developed within the broad category of the digital humanities, could be used to study visual and verbal texts. I work on the nineteenth-century periodical press, where one often struggles with the sheer size of the archive. Most of the speakers at Genius for Sale! worked effectively with a range of seemingly unwieldy archival material by deploying methods from statistical and economic analyses. I look forward to exploring the possibility of applying similar methods to study patterns of literary production in the Victorian periodical press. The lastsession of the day was closest to my area of study, and it suggested new ways of thinking about the relation between artistic worth and its unstable relation to economic value. Professor Fulsas’ study of the contradiction between Ibsen’s representation of bourgeois life as unhappy and his pleasure in an artistic production premised on the conditions of a bourgeois life, was particularly suggestive. I shall indeed turn to some of the primary material discussed in the conference to think of models of authorship in nineteenth-century England.
Genius For Sale! Blog Post on the OCLW Website >>