Perspective: Digitizing the Diary – Experiments in Queer Encoding (A Retrospective and a Prospective)

Abstract

AbstractThis essay reflects on the process I am leading within the Victorian Lives and Letters Consortium ( ) to create a scholarly edition of the diary of ‘Michael Field’ (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper). Situated in relation to a broader context of nineteenth-century manuscript digitization, it reflects both on the possibilities the digital environment offers for the study of manuscript life-writing, and on the timely and significant questions Bradley and Cooper’s diary raises for the field of manuscript digitization. By revisiting my earlier analysis of Bradley and Cooper’s collaborative life-writing, I probe the nature of their joint diary, asking what type of document it is and how it sits in relation to both nineteenth-century and contemporary understandings of life-writing. I then consider the new kinds of analysis and investigation the digitized diary will make possible, and the kind of new knowledge (historical and otherwise) we might seek from it. The journals ...