Re: Search Technologies: A Counterfactual Exploration of The Wellesley Index

Abstract

Abstract:What if Walter Houghton had had email and access to Google Books? This essay extends Derrida’s argument in Archive Fever about the shaping influence of technologies of communication and archivization to the field of Victorian periodicals bibliography, drawing on the history of The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals and the author’s experience collaborating on the Periodical Poetry Index. By defamiliarizing our understanding of the historical past, the impossible logic of the counterfactual helps us to see it, and our present, more clearly.