Tracking Pirates through the Digital Archive: The Case of Dickens

Abstract

The proliferation of digitized nineteenth-century newspapers over the last decade or so has understandably been greeted with enthusiasm by many Humanities scholars. At their best these digital resources offer deep levels of searchability and the potential for comparing cultural trends across and between different global cultures. With their help, we might eventually come to understand both synchronic and diachronic nineteenth-century language systems more fully than ever before, able in effect to eavesdrop on the dialogic interactions of a lost world by extracting and analysing slices of its daily life, or comparing its shifting concerns over time and space. For Book Historians, however, these resources raise some methodological problems that suggest we would be wise not to jettison the print archive entirely. Using a keyword search for Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations as a case study, this article aims to explore some of the pleasures and pitfalls of using digitized Anglophone newspapers for book historical research.