digital history

This blog stems from an ongoing project that explores the potential of digital newspaper archives. Whereas newspaper research used to be a hard slog scanning through microfilm, newspapers can now be searched online. One useful application of these new tools is to investigate more widely the aspects of the history of education that were given publicity in contemporary newspapers. One of these aspects is the detailed reporting of lectures and field excursions, which are only occasionally reproduced in academic journals. 

In August 1848 a party of gentlemen from Sheffield went to Castleton to learn about geology. They were members of the Sheffield Literary & Philosophical Society, and they had decided to undertake regular field trips. In 1847 they had gone to Roche Abbey near Rotherham. Castleton was their second excursion where, after exploring Peak Cavern, they gathered for an impromptu lecture by William Lee (an engineer), who explained the geology of the Peak District. 

Such expeditions were an important contribution to learning in the 19^th century, providing opportunities for a wider dissemination of scientific understanding. This was achieved by publishing lectures and field trips in the newspapers. For instance, the Roche Abbey excursion was described, as became usual practice, in the Sheffield Independent of 28^th August 1847, mentioning the highlight of finding mineral specimens in a quarry. 

The Castleton trip had a substantial write-up in the paper on 19^th August 1848. The men (this seems to have been an all-male bastion) had reached Castleton at noon. The company was mostly made up of medical men, but it also included several scientists and the mathematician Rev Samuel Earnshaw (1805-1888), one of the founders of Firth College, a precursor of the University of Sheffield, and later commemorated by lending his name to a Sheffield University Hall of Residence (1965-2006). 

When it started to rain, the group retreated to Peak Cavern, and spent two hours exploring: a week earlier, after heavy rain, the interior had been flooded, and one party devoted their time to examining dead insects, left when the waters subsided. Another party discussed the formation of stalactites. They then gathered near the mouth of the cavern to hear William Lee explain current thinking about faulting and volcanic activity as an explanation for the juxtaposition of limestone, shale and millstone-grit.

In part the impetus for educational trips such as these had been the development of the railway network, and the provision of cheaper group-booked tickets. Educational societies and institutions used the excursion trains to explore further afield. For example, some Mechanics Institutes such as the one in Leeds, organised excursions for their students. The newspapers provided guides to places to visit, such as those appearing in the paper in five instalments from 22^nd July to 23^rd September 1848.

But another inspiration for the excursions had been the innovation of trips for young people five years earlier. The People’s College in Sheffield was founded in 1842 to provide educational opportunities for working class teenagers and young adults (male and female). The College’s principal, Rev Robert Bayley, had a plan for the students to visit all places of botanical or scientific interest that could be reached inexpensively in a day, and he organised about three trips a year. The first expedition of the People’s College was to Roche Abbey in 1842, followed by Wentworth Castle, and Beauchief Abbey. 

In 1843 a party of 200 took the train to Swinton, north of Rotherham, and walked more than three miles to Conisbrough Castle (the women travelled there by canal boat). Upon arrival they split into parties to look at flowers and insects, and then attended a lecture at the castle by Rev Bayley (Sheffield Independent, 9^thSeptember).

In August 1844 a People’s College party of 400 went by excursion train to York, a journey of two-and-a-half hours, arriving at noon and departing at 7 pm. The trip was described in the paper on 31^st August. The students walked around the city in procession, and they visited the castle and the cathedral and walked around the medieval walls. They had hoped to look around the museum as well, but they were prevented from doing so because of their large numbers. The curator did offer to allow small parties of older students, but this arrangement was declined by the group.

The Sheffield People’s College, through the publicity for its meetings and excursions, became an inspiration to others. For example, a Nottingham people’s college was set up in 1846 along similar lines. Unfortunately, when Rev Bayley left in 1848, the Sheffield-based college went into decline for several decades. However, by then, there were many educational ventures around the country, and through the newspapers the learning experience of participants reached a wider audience.

19^th-century newspapers provide a unique record of both lectures and excursions by the emerging educational societies and colleges, boosted by public interest in these detailed accounts. It is only by researching this material that we can gain a complete picture of the growth of public education.

Tom Welsh hosts the website historyregained.net, which provides a showcase for investigating applications of newspaper and other sources. He has also published two books via Amazon Kindle: Fake Heritage: solving mysteries; and Hilltop bonfires: marking royal events.

Cover image: Peak Cavern, Castleton, Derbyshire, England, circa 1890s. Photograph from the Photochrom Print Collection, courtesy of Library of Congress

The idea of a ‘hyperlink’ is now 75 years old.  Most genealogies trace its origins to Vannevar Bush, and his 1945 article ‘As We May Think’. Over the next five decades, via Project Xanadu, Autodesk, HyperTIES, and Hypercard, the idea of linking pages and objects across documents grew to become the foundational concept that would power the World Wide Web. And through the Web, in just the last 30 years hyperlinks have been normalised in everyday life. They are ubiquitous. Even before the pandemic, no academic would consider teaching without the online resources accessed via the web, and organised via hyperlinks.

And yet, when it comes to academic publishing, and historical monographs in particular, we persist in simply ‘turning a page’. We publish books in hard copy, replete with footnotes and endnotes requiring a physical library to check. Historians and humanists have repeatedly failed to rise to the challenge of both the hyperlink and the opportunities it holds to enhance distant learning.

Perhaps the existential threat of a global pandemic can change this. In the light of our locked-in lives, forms of pedagogy and publication built around a library have become as old fashioned as bustles and galoshes.

In 2015, we published a monograph with Cambridge University Press that sought to build on these affordances and traditions. Our attempts to break the mould of electronic publishing did not go well. London Lives: Poverty, Crime and the Making of the Modern City, 1690-1800, was designed to give direct electronic access to both a wide-ranging historical argument, and all the sources upon which it was based. It included hyperlinks to digitised versions of most of the primary sources cited in our footnotes and quoted in the text, and numerous downloadable databases, printed illustrations, and online secondary sources. It was an attempt to re-invent the monograph – to take a scholarly apparatus designed for moveable type and re-imagine it for the World Wide Web.

But, while the hard-copy book was well received, taking its place on the library shelf, the electronic edition was a failure. Most of the formats it was published in (notably PDFs) obscured the functionality we had worked hard to embed in the text; and perhaps more importantly, it came out at a moment when there was little appetite for innovation. The 2010s saw the failure of several journals of ‘Digital History’ and ‘Digital Humanities’ and the decline in academic ‘blogging’. London Lives was made available in a number of formats unfamiliar to most readers and electronic editions accounted for only 12 per cent of sales.

With the permission of CUP, this year we decided to publish a new, open access, online edition, which takes advantage of all the affordances of online publication; it can be accessed via the London Lives homepage.  We did not set out on this course in response to the Covid pandemic, but the changing landscape of education it prompted makes us hope that the moment has come for this particular experiment.

London Lives title page, open access electronic edition 2020

Using modest funds made available by the University of Sussex, we engaged Dr Sharon Howard to rework the text into a HTML format via Markdown – making it easy to read in most browsers, on desktops, laptops and phones. The graphs and tables were cleaned up, and new colour images replaced the black and white versions demanded for the hard copy. Most importantly, new navigation strategies were built in, including an electronic table of contents, numbered paragraphs, linked endnotes, and a global search facility. All the compromises of the first edition were addressed.

And what we found was that in the five years since they were last checked, and while a very small number websites had disappeared, much more content had emerged. Books that we previously could not locate online were now readily accessible via a snippet view in Google Books, and DOIs were present for the vast majority of articles. In 2015, it felt like we were cutting against the grain. Five years later the infrastructure of a properly hyperlinked, open access e-book was largely in place.

A page of London Lives with linked resources (Click on the image to view it in greater detail)

In many respects this edition of London Lives remains remarkably conservative. There is no video, no graphic novel. The argument progresses in a linear and chronological manner, decade by decade, with no narrative tricks along the way. We purposefully designed it so as not to scare the horses, and to conform to the construction of ‘authority’ on the page demanded by traditional academic history writing. Even with its reliance on hyperlinks, it is a book that could have been imagined in 1945, and implemented at any point after 1987 when Hypercard was published; and one built on the referencing conventions of the 19^th century.

But it is also a book that can be read, and taught, online – with all the references ready to hand. That a global pandemic has turned our minds to the problems of teaching and learning at a distance in a new, online world re-confirms our commitment to exploiting the affordances of the hyperlink – and to the re-invention of the monograph for the virtual classroom.

Was it worth it? We believe that the new edition, launched on 8 October, will have a larger readership, which will be able to engage more deeply with the text and the sources on which it is based. And this new edition is a beautiful thing. It is by far the most user-friendly version of the book so far produced, with easy navigability, thorough linkages to external sources, and keyword searching supplementing the index.

While cost remains an issue, it is often used to justify resistance to innovation. Publishers and academics need to question their business models. After all, the software used to create this edition is free and open source, and how many authors actually make a significant profit from publishing monographs? We believe that the format of this book represents an attractive possible future – the academic monograph for a world in lockdown.

Tim Hitchcock is Professor of Digital History at the University of Sussex
Robert Shoemaker is Professor of Eighteenth Century British History at the University of Sheffield

‘You are seeking many things of me who am exceedingly busy, and you send a messenger who presses me too much at his own pleasure’.[1] Writing in 1076, it is unsurprising that Pope Gregory VII was annoyed by a bishop’s questioning.[2]

Only a few months earlier, Gregory had taken the astonishing measure of excommunicating (the first of three times!) Emperor Henry IV. He was simultaneously attempting to implement a reformation of Latin Christianity itself, now commonly known as ‘Gregorian Reform’.[3] It is safe to say that Gregory was indeed a ‘busy man’.

I’ve spent much of the summer looking into what kept Gregory busy, by studying the Register of his letters which is preserved in the Vatican Library. Using new digital techniques that have never been systematically applied before to Gregory VII’s letters, I’ve discovered a few things that might come as a surprise.

A page from the Register of Gregory VII (showing the so-called Dictatus Papae)

But let me begin with the Register itself, and its 389 entries. How can such an important figure have written so few letters over 12 years? Part of the answer lies with the use of messengers, with Alexander Murray noting that it was ‘more remarkable’ when a messenger came with a letter than without one.[4] As a result, although there certainly were some letters that weren’t copied into the Register, it’s likely that the Register is at least broadly representative of Gregory’s correspondence as a whole. [5]

The process of collecting and analysing the data led to some interesting discoveries even before we started to crunch the results. We noted for instance a probable mistake in the 1920s edition of the register by German historian Erich Caspar. Gregory wrote two letters on the first and fourth of March 1077 from a place Caspar identified as Carpineto, and two subsequent letters on the 21^st and 23^rd of March from Carpi and Bianello. But Carpi and Bianello are both around 500km away from Carpineto. It is therefore more likely that Gregory was in Carpineti which is only around 50km away and makes more sense travel-wise.[6]

These same entries may also shed light on Gregory’s travel speed. On the 21^st of March, two letters are recorded, issued from different locations. The first, letter 16, is written from Carpi, while the other entry is written from Bianello. These locations are approximately 44km apart and so may show us something like the distance Gregory could potentially cover in a day’s journey.

However, things started to get really interesting when we began to work on the data itself. Two key themes that we explored using visualisations are the strategy behind Gregory’s letter sending, and factors affecting this strategy. As can be seen from the map shown below, Gregory’s recipients were far and wide, even reaching areas such as Norway. This matches Cowdrey’s view that the papacy increasingly saw its function as ‘one of world-wide vigilance and activity’.[7]

All the locations that Gregory VII sent letters to

This ‘world-wide’ aspect is demonstrated even more when we map the recipients of these letters onto the ancient Roman road network. While the majority fit on these Roman roads, we can also see that Gregory is communicating with areas not part of the ancient empire, especially in the northern areas of eastern Europe. This visualises Gregory’s personal strategy of making sure the Roman church was ‘in the fullest sense the universal mother’, concerned with Christians ‘whether or not they lived within the boundaries of the Roman empire at the apogee of its prosperity’.[8]

The destinations of Gregory’s letters in red, imposed onto a map of Roman roads at the time.

Another element of Gregory’s strategy is his politics. The historian Cowdrey believed Gregory wasn’t purposefully political, instead acting upon ‘flexible’ values and methods to pursue goals that were at root ‘religious and moral’.[9] Looking at the number of secular versus clerical recipients of his letters supports this idea of Gregory and his strategy. This data shows us that for the large majority of Gregory’s pontificate, the majority of his communication was with clerical figures. At no point did he really try and specifically increase his political involvement with secular figures.

The number of secular recipients and clerical recipients of Gregory’s letters over time

A second dimension of these letters that the data helps us understand regards the factors that determined their sending, notably the issue of travel. In a world where we can send a message thousands of miles almost instantly, it seems alien to think about a messenger carrying a letter over a number of months. This is how Gregory’s letters were delivered however, with 3-4 months being the standard time for a message and reply.[10]

With this amount of time travelling and the method of travel, weather conditions could become an important consideration. This is explored in the two visualisations below. The first one colour coordinates all the destinations of the letters by season, and seemingly doesn’t show any clear trend. It even shows some of the furthest away letters like those in Norway being sent in winter – which at first glance seems to contradict the idea of season being important. However, if we take the figure of 40km per day as an average speed estimate, we can see that by dispatching the letter in December, the messenger could be expected to arrive in Trondheim sometime around the start of March, and after a stay of a month or two arrive back in Rome well before the autumn, thereby
avoiding the Scandinavian winter.

The destinations of Gregory’s letters colour coded according to the season they were sent

And looking more closely, consideration of season seems to have been quite important to Gregory. By examining the average distance letters were sent in each month, it can be seen that letters sent in the months of March, April and May covered the most distance; with those sent in January and February generally travelling the least distance. This suggests that Gregory considered not just politics but also seasons and weather when sending his letters, with implications for medieval diplomacy more generally.

The average distance of the destination of Gregory’s letters according to the month they were sent

A linked issue concerns the average number of letters Gregory sent each month. Looked at in aggregate, it can clearly be seen that Gregory’s correspondence spikes around March and April, before falling off in the summer and rising again as winter approaches. This trend probably reflects the liturgical calendar. Easter would have been an important time for Gregory, and is also when he held a number of councils. February and August were by contrast very quiet times for the papal scribes.

The total number of letters sent by Gregory in each month

The use of data analysis and visualisation can give us an alternative and valuable perspective on sources that have already been extensively studied by conventional means. They shed new light on existing historiography, such as looking at whether Gregory really was a ‘holy Satan’ or ‘political pope’ by looking at the recipients of his letters. But they can also even perhaps open up new avenues to explore, such as how earthly limitations like seasonal travel may have played an important role in how figures like Gregory VII conducted business. The use of these tools can open up an array of possibilities that would greatly benefit any field of history.

George Litchfield is an undergraduate student at Sheffield. The project Mapping Pope Gregory VII’s letters was supervised by Dr Tom Stafford and Dr Charles West.

Link to the dataset and expanded overview this article is based on: https://doi.org/10.15131/shef.data.12781049

[1] H. E. J. Cowdrey, The Register of Pope Gregory VII 1073—1085: An English Translation (Oxford, 2002), p. 208.

[2] Ibid., p. xi.

[3] Norman Tanner [Review], Reform and the Papacy in the Eleventh Century: Spirituality and Social Change (Manchester, 2005), by Kathleen Cushing, The Heythrop Journal 48.2 (2007), pp. 293-94.

[4] Alexander Murray, ‘Pope Gregory VII and His Letters’, Traditio 22 (1966), pp. 176-77.

[5] Cowdrey, The Register of Pope Gregory VII 1073—1085, p. xii; Murray, ‘Pope Gregory VII and His Letters’, p. 163.

[6] Cowdrey, The Register of Pope Gregory VII 1073—1085, pp. 224-229.

[7] H. E. J. Cowdrey, Pope Gregory VII, 1073–1085 (Oxford, 1998), p. 10.

[8] Ibid., p. 2.

[9] Ibid., p. 2, 86.

[10] Murray, ‘Pope Gregory VII and His Letters’, p. 168.