Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry (dvpp.uvic.ca) dir. by Alison Chapman (review)

Reviewed by: Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry (dvpp.uvic.ca) dir. by Alison Chapman Constance Crompton (bio) Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry (dvpp.uvic.ca), Alison Chapman, Director In scholarly attention and popular memory, Scottish poet, journalist, and reformer Charles Mackay has outlived his critics. The author is perhaps best remembered for Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841) and The Founders of the American Republic: A History and Biography (1885), but he also wrote a handful of reference works and reminiscences, and edited the Morning Chronicle, the Illustrated London News, and the Glasgow Argus. He clearly had no love for his critics. In All the Year Round, he proffered the following lines: What knows the critic of the book?As much, it may be, as the rook,Perched on the high cathedral tower,Knows of the solemn organ's power. ("The Poet") Such rollicking and humorous rhymes are a delight—there is much pleasure to be had in bad, snarky, or heavy-handed poetry—and there is no shortage of all three in Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry online (dvpp.uvic.ca). Directed by Alison Chapman, the DVPP aims to give its readers a representative sample of Victorian periodical poetry, alongside a host of digital tools, biographies, metadata, and contextual notes, which together make the project's website a complete hub for periodical poetry research. The DVPP project sets out to answer the following questions: How do the literary, formal, and material features of periodical poetry challenge scholarly taxonomies of genre, prosody, and print culture? How does Victorian periodical poetry offer a more historically nuanced literary history? ("About"). A research project team could work to answer these questions through careful encoding, close reading, and contextual research, without offering text, material, and formal features to web users. The DVPP team has instead published the primary source material that underpins their research online, alongside tools for further research. There is more material on the site, rendered more easily traversable, than could be offered in print form. The team has indexed 15,548 poems and translations from 21 periodicals and has transcribed and encoded 2,181 of the poems. The site features short biographies of 3,966 poets, illustrators, and translators. Chapman and her team have taken full advantage of the aggregating power of online publication: biography readers are offered a list of all the poems on the site by each poet and can click through to any of the transcribed poems. Each transcribed poem is accompanied by a facsimile page image, a description of page ornaments (which can be used to drive visual culture enthusiasts' search returns and can serve screen readers); line numbers; the rhyme scheme; rhyme highlighting; [End Page 327] sonic device controls; illustration notes; editorial notes; and what the DVPP calls statistics: enumerations of word length, rhyme types, anaphora, epistrophe, internal rhymes, and other features. Each poem is also accompanied by production metadata: information about the poet, encoder credits, the document's review status, and source code. The site's search features are particularly impressive. Users can search by document type, publication, people (filtering further on nationality, periodical, role, assigned sex, birth and death date, and links to external authorities), as well as poem and illustration details. The search features stemming, so searchers are spared having to guess at what might be missed in a keyword search: a search for tower, for example, returns tower, towers, towering, and toweringly. The site also offers several novel tools, two of which are well worth special mention. The first is an anthology builder, which is enormously useful for teaching. The builder has users list the DVPP IDs of the poems they would like in their online anthology, then aggregates the poems into a table of contents complete with links to the poems and poets as well as the date of publication and the periodical in which the poem appears. Each anthology URL includes the search query that produced it, so it can be used in online syllabi, email, and other link-friendly environments. The DVPP also features an index of rhyming words—it is in this index that one can find the rhyme of book with rook or tower with power...

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