Technologies of Serendipity

Abstract

In reckoning with the digital restructuring of the scholarly discourse network circa 2004, Patrick Leary begins with a story. It is a story about how, thanks to web discovery and email contacts, scholarship on Letitia Elizabeth Landon took a major turn. This happened because of the “fortuitous electronic connections” of people and documents facilitated by the internet. 1 And making sense of this experience, rather than detailing specific resources for digital scholarship, becomes Leary’s abiding concern in “Googling the Victorians.” His essay ponders a “profound shift” towards casual discovery, “a serendipity of unexpected connections to both information and people that is becoming increasingly central to the progress of Victorian research.” 2 If, in the subtitle to their 1982 volume The Victorian Periodical Press, Joanne Shattock and Michael Wolff nominate “Samplings and Soundings” as our only reasonable approach, Leary begins to clarify how such casual discoveries should not merely be viewed as symptoms of trying to find specifics amid superabundance, whether in terms of the Victorian archive or networked digital information. 3 Instead, that characteristic research experience has been absorbed into the technological routines of how we work now. In other words, chance discovery is not a bug; it is a feature. It is the very condition of “Googling the Victorians,” as Leary calls it. A decade later, we find ourselves deeper in the networked experience of such unexpected connections, with more perspective that allows us to acknowledge, critique, and perhaps even credit serendipity as scholarly technique. “Googling the Victorians” also reveals the scholar’s reflex to enfold fortuitous discoveries within descriptive explanation. The essay shows a consistent dynamic between the item of scholarly interest, serendipitously found, and the narrative in which the researcher governs the unexpected. In drawing this connection, Leary makes a crucial distinction between serendipity and randomness. If we all have random encounters all the time, serendipity requires recognizing such an encounter for its meaning, requir