The politics of ornament: remediation and/in The Evergreen.

Kooistra, Lorraine Janzen

In "towards a theory of the periodical genre," Margaret Beetham observes that "the material characteristics of the periodical ... have consistently been central to its meaning" (22-23). In particular, Beetham emphasizes, "the relation of blocks of text to visual material is a crucial part of" the periodical's processes of signification and the reader's experience of making meaning out of its time-stamped yet open-ended issues (24). While this theoretical position underlies much excellent critical work in periodical studies, it is less evident in the electronic repositories on which research in the field increasingly relies. In this paper, I examine what it might mean to inform our digitization practices with a theory of the periodical hypertext as a remediated object. Focusing on the specific editorial problem of periodical pages decorated with textual ornaments, I take as my case study The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal (1895 to 1897), a Scottish magazine scheduled for markup and publication on The Yellow Nineties Online. Making remediated Celtic ornament a structural feature of its aesthetic design and an integral expression of its larger political agenda, the Evergreen reminds us of what is at stake if our own electronic remediation practices are not adequate to the periodical objects we study.

The Evergreen and periodical form: the politics of ornament

In common with The Yellow Book (1894 to 1897), The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal was a short-lived aesthetic magazine with the physical features of a book and an intense and obvious identification with a symbolic colour. With its high-quality paper, excellent printing, and single-column layout within wide margins, The Evergreen clearly took The Yellow Book for its model. But while the London-based Yellow Book was (and is) associated with decadence, the Edinburgh-based Evergreen championed regeneration and renewal--politically, spiritually, and aesthetically--as an organ of the Celtic revival and Scottish Renascence. Despite these differences, the magazines' commonalities linked them in a periodical network of production and consumption. Among those who contributed to both serials were poet Ronald Campbell Macfie and Glasgow School artist Edward Atkinson Hornel. A number of The Evergreens artists show the influence of Aubrey Beardsley's black-and-white pen work in their designs. William Macdonald, who co-wrote the "Proem" to The Evergreens first number, sent an inscribed copy of the magazine to Beardsley as co-editor of The Yellow Book; he would have received this Scottish tribute just as he was being fired from his post after the arrest of Oscar Wilde in April 1895 (Houfe, Fin de Siecle 105). Notably, The Bookman reviewed volume 5 of The Yellow Book (which appeared late that month, hastily cleansed of Beardsley's artwork) together with the first issue of The Evergreen, declaring: "It is impossible to keep from grouping these two 'seasonals' together, and yet green is not nearly so unlike yellow as these northern and southern cousins are unlike each other" (Rev. 91).

If the periodical form is governed, as James Mussell argues, by seriality, miscellaneity, and an ontological condition of existence that posits endless continuity, The Evergreen is an outlier (24). Calling attention to itself as A Northern Seasonal, The Evergreen planned its first series to terminate with the fourth issue and substituted natural cycles for the calendar chronologies on which other Victorian magazines were serialized (day, week, month, quarter, year). Although sometimes described as a quarterly, The Evergreen is actually a semi-annual. The first two numbers, Spring and Autumn, were published around their respective equinoxes in 1895, while the second two, Summer and Winter, were published around their respective solstices in 1896 and 1896/7. Troubling the notion of the periodical form as a serial released into the world according to the regular intervals of industrial time, the format of The Evergreen asserts an alternative relationship to temporality and the body. In their "Proem" to the first number, Macdonald and Thomson name "the seasonal rhythm of the earth ... the ultimate system in which we live" calling for urban life, social relations, and modern science to be reinvigorated by nature, art, and history (9). With their intricate knottings and interlacings, the remediated Celtic ornaments decorating The Evergreens pages express the magazine's argument for the harmonious incorporation of the old and the new. Woven throughout its pages, the Evergreen's textual decorations instantiate claims about the importance of connection and integration across time and space, city and country, techne and art.

As an expression of its radical politics The Evergreen was produced under the conditions of collective organization rather than hierarchical relations. "[T]here has been no central authority, still less constraint" declared "The Envoy" to the fourth and final volume; "without individual or continuous editorship, its artists and writers have been each a law unto themselves" (PG and WM 155). This collaborative approach is evident in The Evergreens tables of contents. As in a relational database, each item carries the same weight or value and can be located through a variety of indexical classifications, such as thematic category, item type (both visual and verbal), and creator. Each number, in turn, is built out of encoded patterns of repetition and variation marked by the changing seasons. Organized according to four fixed headings, only the season--Spring, Autumn, Summer, or Winter--changes in each table of contents: "[The Season] in Nature"; "[The Season] in Life"; "[The Season] in the World"; and "[The Season] in the North." The individual poems, essays, short stories, full-page pictures, and textual ornaments grouped within each category interpret the common theme both uniquely and in relation to each other, within the pages of the seasonal number as well as across the complete print run of four volumes.

In keeping with the precedent established by The Yellow Book, the full-page images published in The Evergreen did not illustrate the magazine's verbal content but stood as texts in their own right. For example, Charles H. Mackie's black-and-white line drawing, "Robene and Makyn," the first full-page picture in "Spring in Nature," interprets the theme by depicting children and lambs on a hillside (17). In contrast to this pastoral scene of innocent young life, the following item, a poem by William Macdonald entitled "A Procession of Causes," celebrates spring as a time of heightened sexual activity: "For the old god Pan hath taken a wife, /And the whole world shares their mirth" (20). The poem's pagan theme recurs in J. Arthur Thomson's essay, "Germinal, Floreal, Prairia," and in pictures such as Robert Burns's "Natura Naturans" and John Duncan's "Apollo's School Days" Other verbal and visual items interpret "Spring in Nature" from a range of perspectives, including scientific, domestic, and even Christian. As the "Proem" declares, spring is not only "the epochal dawn of a new age"; it is also the time of variation and change (Macdonald and Thomson 9-10). Thus, the "particular variation" of the Spring number allows all contributors "to think and to dream, to rhyme and to picture, in unison with the music of the Renascence" (Macdonald and Thomson 10, 15). Collectively, the items in the Spring number evoke and symbolize the dream of a renewed Scottish life on both personal and political levels.

While the full-page pictures respond to a common theme rather than a particular verbal text, the textual ornaments in The Evergreen typically relate specifically to the concerns of the poem, essay, or story whose opening or closing pages they decorate. This representational and interpretive function, however, is of less importance than the structural patterns that emerge from the cumulative effect of the designs across the periodical's pages. Materially, the textual ornaments effect a visual coherence, weaving the title's various items together into an expressive community. More abstractly, the decorations model a way of reimagining and regenerating the built environment of cities, books, and social relations by remediating historical design with the tools and knowledge of the present. Notably, this work of remediation and redirection locates itself in Celtic historical practice. The forms of manuscript illumination translated by The Evergreen for nineteenth-century print culture were themselves interpretive remediations of ancient pagan design. Appearing first in metal and stonework as well as textiles, Celtic patterns of interlaced knots, spirals, and hybrid grotesques were remediated by medieval scribes illuminating Christian manuscripts in Ireland, Scotland, and the British Isles (Bradley 121). A fundamentally ornamental aesthetic, Celtic illumination integrated ancient and modern, pagan and Christian, visual and verbal, through decorative pattern work. In expressing its fin-de-siecle vision for integration and connection, The Evergreen drew on various forms of scribal illumination, including initial letters, miniature scenes and portraits, and decorative borders.

Helen Hay's zoomorphic initial letter "T" introducing Macdonald and Thomson's "Proem" to the Spring issue collaborates with the text in asserting ancient tradition as a ground for future building (figure 1). Although typically abstract, stylized, and geometric, Celtic ornaments often incorporated humanoid, animal, and grotesque figures in their complex designs (Brown 36). In Hay's initial "T" a bird's head decorates the terminus of the cross bar, while another stylized bird inhabits the curved vertical support of the letter. The combination of alphabetic letter and stylized natural form posits the integration of techne and art, while the swirling arabesque design suggests that historical and modern knowledge can combine to imagine an alternative future based on "the Symbiosis" envisioned in the "Proem" "in which the strength of one shall call forth, rather than cancelling, the strength of the other" (Macdonald and Thomson 12).

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

The significance of Hay's Celtic initial at the opening of the volume is reinforced by its reappearance in Alexander Carmichael's "The Land of Lorne and the Satirists of Taynuilt" in the final section, "Spring in the North" This visual repetition asserts a relationship between blocks of text across many pages of the issue, illuminating a shared vision of Celtic history and hope for renewal. Hay's zoomorphic initial marks a particular instance of Celtic change and variation: the importance of poetry and song from Fingal and Ossian to Robert Burns, Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, and beyond. In this context, the bird inhabiting the remediated initial becomes a symbol for both the annual spring event of renewal in nature and the ongoing (re)generation of song in Celtic life.

Some initials in The Evergreen are "historiated," that is, they combine an alphabetic letter with a small narrative scene. According to Michelle Brown in Understanding Illuminated Manuscripts, historiated initials developed in insular illuminations of the early eighth century and became popular features in medieval manuscripts (68). W. G. Burn-Murdoch's self-illustrated initial for the story "Lengthening Days," however, evokes the layout of Victorian illustrated magazines as much as medieval manuscripts (figure 2). Author/illustrator William Makepeace Thackeray, for instance, drew historiated capitals for the serial fiction he published in The Cornhill and elsewhere. The visual effect of Burn-Murdoch's decorated page thus connects Celtic illumination and manuscript culture with modern innovation and periodical culture. Lined up with the title, the historiated initial for "Lengthening Days" forms the right angle of the printed page's top and left justifications with a black background of tall evergreens. The foreground, a hill of white space, is implied by the irregular lines of type cutting a diagonal down to the point where left justification resumes on the page. On this hill built of print, the protagonists of the story (a husband and wife living on the land) hunt for their dinner. Located in the top right of this scene, the capital "T" connects the hand drawn with the typeset, the human with the machine. In its realistic, contemporary drawing style and reliance on lines of type to complete its means of signification, this historiated initial remediates scribal practice using the media and technologies of Victorian print culture.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

In addition to the historiations, inhabitations, and arabesques of Celtic decoration, The Evergreen sometimes remediates the manuscript "miniature" a small illustration not incorporated into another decorative element, such as a letter (Brown 86). Miniatures appear most frequently in The Evergreen as headpieces and tailpieces marking the beginning and end of a verbal text respectively. While these are frequently Celtic in style, they sometimes incorporate more modern artistic methods, such as the silhouette seen in W. Smith's tailpiece depicting the Edinburgh skyline (figure 3). Punctuating publisher Patrick Geddes's essay on "The Scots Renascence" the final essay of "Spring in the North" Smith's miniature illuminates the central role of "the city set upon a hill" in the Celtic revival championed by the magazine (Macdonald and Thomson 14). In this culminating essay, Geddes situates The Evergreen in another cycle of renewal, one connected to human building rather than seasonal change. Claiming that no tradition is "more persistently characteristic of Edinburgh than that of Allan Ramsay, who amid much other sowing and planting, edited and published an 'Evergreen' in 1724," Geddes identifies the political and aesthetic model for his own publication of 1895 to 1897. This publishing cycle has continued into the twenty-first century, with a new Evergreen, "harking back to the Evergreens published by Allan Ramsay and Patrick Geddes," launched by the Edinburgh Old Town Development Trust in fall 2014 on the occasion of the Scottish referendum on national independence ("The Evergreen"). With the publication of the first in a series of four volumes, the contemporary Evergreen claims another form of serialization, one driven by human hopes of political and cultural renewal in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twenty-first centuries. In a prescient if partisan review in The Bookman in 1895, contributor Victor Branford expressed this political vision of The Evergreens serialization: "Truth to tell," he wrote, "the new Scottish quarterly ... is primarily the beginning of an effort to give periodic expression to a movement that is mainly architectural, educational, scientific" (89, emphasis added).

As a self-styled periodic expression of political hope in aesthetic form, the fin-de-siecle Evergreen combined present-day methods with remediated historical forms to express a vision for a regenerated future. In this building project, the magazine's decorations formed "the visible link" connecting human life and history with social and artistic aspiration (Branford 89). To express this connection, Celtic illuminators frequently celebrated human makers in author portraits. A repurposed version of this form of miniature appears in the headpiece to Fiona Macleod's poem "The Bandruidh" (figure 4). As the fictive leader of the Celtic revival ventriloquized with resounding success by William Sharp, Fiona Macleod had no face to represent. Instead, artist Alice Gray portrays the Bandruidh as the pagan author of spring in a cameo portrait encircled by decorative Celtic arabesques and spirals. The latter devices evoke what the Victorian Grammar of Ornament identifies as "[t]he most universal and singularly diversified ornament employed by [Celtic] artificers in metal, stone, or manuscripts" that is, "one or more narrow ribbons interlaced and knotted, often excessively intricate in their convolutions, and often symmetrical and geometrical" (Westwood 92). Set within these symmetrical interlacings, Gray's portrait depicts the Druid sorceress of Celtic legend as "the Green Lady" of Spring, crowned with flowers (Macleod 98 note).

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 4 OMITTED]

The most intricately designed page in the first volume of The Evergreen is in the "Spring in the North" section. John Duncan, head of the Arts School in Edinburgh and a leading painter of the Celtic revival (Houfe, Dictionary 292), joined revivalist William Sharp (appearing in this instance under his own name) to present a composite text celebrating renewal (figure 5). In a headpiece showing the influence of Japanese block prints on new Scottish art, Duncan uses the disposition of black-and-white space and curvilinear design to depict an anthropomorphized representation of the North Wind blowing over the sea. Duncan connects his image and Sharp's lyric by inserting a hand-lettered decorative title within a ruled rectangular box at the base of his frieze and developing the initial "T"--once again inhabited by a stylized bird--into an arabesque border descending the left margin. Read in the light of its visual accompaniment, the North Wind represents the "Spirit of dauntless life, / And Lord of Liberty" (Sharp 109). Remediating Oriental art forms and fin-de-siecle aestheticism as well as medieval scribal traditions, this visual/verbal call for Celtic renewal expresses the politics of ornament. Decoration, as Franz Sales Meyer observed in 1892, "is invariably the arbitrary Variation of some familiar fundamental idea," its style determined first by the nature of the material and second by the leading ideas of its time and place (viii). Variation and change, The Evergreens leading ideas, are expressed through the remediated Celtic decorations that structure its design and shape its meaning.

Remediating The Evergreen

Remediation, as Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin observe, presents new media "as refashioned and improved versions of other media" (14-15). As refashioned versions of scribal illuminations, The Evergreens textual decorations are self-consciously "after the manner of Celtic Ornament" (Contents, emphasis added). Less self-consciously, as we have seen, they are also after the manner of Victorian illustrated magazines: initial letters, headpieces, and tailpieces were regular features of nineteenth-century periodicals as different from each other as Punch and The Cornhill. Textual decorations in magazines were made possible by "improved" technologies that enabled the mass dissemination of picture and print to a wide audience of newly literate readers. Throughout much of the nineteenth century, the technologies of wood engraving and relief printing refashioned scribal illumination for all classes of magazine consumption (Kooistra). The Evergreens avant-garde predecessor, The Yellow Book, evidently viewed these ubiquitous textual decorations as one of "the bad old traditions of periodical literature" that it rejected in its bid to be a modern magazine (Prospectus). The Yellow Book expressed a self-conscious modernity through its format--based on a strict segregation of pictures and letterpress--and its up-to-date image-reproduction methods using photographic processes. In contrast, The Evergreen historicized and politicized the Victorian periodical tradition by reclaiming Celtic roots in hand-painted manuscripts for its wood-engraved visual material.

[FIGURE 5 OMITTED]

As part of its agenda as a modern magazine, The Yellow Book was explicit about its use of state-of-the-art process engraving, giving prominent credit to the Joseph Swan Electric Engraving Company for halftone reproductions and to the Carl Hentschel firm for line blocks. Using these photomechanical processes allowed The Yellow Book to multiply the media showcased in its pages: oil paintings, watercolours, etchings, silk fans, pencil drawings, pen-and-ink sketches, bookplate designs, and more were reproduced in its galleries of pictures. This deployment of mechanical reproduction made a diverse and disparate collection of modern art immediately accessible to anyone with a copy of The Yellow Book. In The Evergreen, full-page pictures and textual decorations are exclusively linear reproductions. Although no explicit credit is given, the black-and-white engravings are occasionally signed with a tiny "Hare sc," the usual signature for Thomas Matthews Hare and Company, a London-based firm of wood engravers (Engen 113).

If The Yellow Book made its practices of remediation explicitly part of its agenda as a modern magazine, was The Evergreen silent about its technologies of reproduction in the interests of another kind of immediacy? According to Bolter and Grusin's theory, "immediacy dictates that the medium itself should disappear and leave us in the presence of the thing represented" (5-6). With local artists credited for their work "after the manner of Celtic ornament," but the reproduction firm left unrecognized, the textual decorations in The Evergreen appear on the page as if they were the unmediated work of Scottish hands--simply pen and ink on paper. At the same time, a strategic veil is drawn over the intervention of London-based technology in an organ of Celtic revival. In a magazine keen to credit individual contributors and revive historical practices, this erasure of the engraver presents an interesting problem in The Evergreens politics of ornament and collaborative practice.

As Mussell observes, "The digital offers the means through which we can interrogate the media of the past, but this is only possible if we can interrogate the digital media of the present" (iv). In remediating Victorian periodicals such as The Evergreen and The Yellow Book through the new technologies of digitization we, too, are inevitably caught up in "the twin logics of hypermediacy and immediacy" (Bolter and Grusin 5). Digitized page images give us a sense of immediate access to historical print culture and its objects in virtual form. However, the transformations that convert these documents to pixels change the objects we study into hypertexts. In the remainder of this paper, I examine how digital humanities practices and textual scholarship provide models for media studies by making explicit the differences between material periodicals and electronic editions.

An edition of any kind, whether print or digital, must begin with a theory of text; even in editions where no such statement is found, the theoretical framework is always implicit. But like "periodical," the term "text" is extraordinarily malleable and difficult to define. This is why "textual studies," according to Matthew Kirschenbaum, "should be recognized as among the most sophisticated branches of media studies we have evolved" (16). Kirschenbaum cites the groundbreaking work of D. F. McKenzie, whose definition of bibliography as "the discipline that studies texts as recorded forms, and the processes of their transmission, including their production and reception" (12) applies to the study of media of all kinds, including periodicals. McKenzie's capacious definition of "text" encompasses "verbal, visual, oral, and numeric data, in the form of maps, prints, and music, of archives of recorded sound, of films, videos, and any computer-stored information, everything in fact from epigraphy to the latest forms of discography" (13). Presented in the Panizzi lectures at Oxford in 1986, McKenzie's case for "the book as an expressive form" provided the foundation for a new approach to textual studies, alert to the ways in which "forms effect meaning" (9, 13). Within a decade of McKenzie's lectures, the worldwide web had emerged and Jerome McGann was calling for "Hypermedia editions that incorporate audial and/or visual elements ... since literary works are themselves always more or less elaborate multimedia form" (4). While periodicals are not, strictly speaking, "literary texts," the complexities of their own multimedia forms demand the deep structures of editorial remediation McGann had in mind for books, as his own example of nineteenth-century annuals makes clear (8-9).

Like the gift books and annuals of the earlier Victorian period, the aesthetic magazines of the fin de siecle provide object lessons in multimedia forms of print culture. Twenty years after McGann's "Rationale of Hypertext," however, we have yet to build digital editions of periodicals fully informed by the possibilities of his "hypermedia edition," McKenzie's notion of text, and Beetham's definition of the periodical. Not surprisingly, the problem of relating blocks of letterpress to graphic material continues to be both the greatest challenge of digitized periodicals and their most alluring potential for scholars. "How to incorporate digitized images into the computational field is not simply a problem that HyperEditing must solve," McGann observed, "it is a problem created by the very arrival of the possibilities of HyperEditing" (11).

Building a digital edition of a periodical, as Mussell rightly observes, forces us "to consider the significance of its constituent parts in defining what it means" (5). If, as we have seen, textual ornaments are as vital to The Evergreens expression of meaning as the segregation of pictures and letterpress is to The Yellow Books, how can we make our digitizations adequate to their constituent parts? This would require marking up their material characteristics, or--to adapt Beetham's definition of the periodical form to digital editing practice--relating blocks of text to visual material in the database. Bibliographic and linguistic content can generate metadata relatively easily, but this is not the case for visual material. Despite significant technological advances in image recognition software, these tools have not yet been developed for digitized Victorian periodicals. In consequence, only verbal items can be systematically searched and retrieved in most electronic repositories. Since we know visual material to be a constitutive feature of periodicals, our vast digitization projects urgently need to find ways to mark up images for search and retrieval. In this project, digital humanists need to work with software engineers to develop the tools needed to generate metadata from images. Image-matching software applied to illustrations in broadsides, modeled by the Broadside Ballads Online project (Bergel et al.), suggests what can be done when humanities scholars and engineers collaborate. Another promising prototype is the UVic Image Markup Tool developed by Mark Holmes for annotating and encoding visual material in extensible markup language (XML). Crowd sourcing annotations might be another viable approach to big data, as suggested by the Lost Visions project led by Julia Thomas for the markup of one million illustrations in the British Library's collection of printed books. Given human and technological limitations and the scale of online repositories, marking up the physical features and constituent parts of periodicals remains a crucial but daunting problem in digital remediation.

The Yellow Nineties Online offers one model for how a periodical's constituent parts might be marked up in a way adequate to the material object and explicit to the processes of remediation. We have been able to develop this prototype because the project's relatively small scale can accommodate the hours of human labour that go into coding thousands (rather than millions) of digital objects. The Yellow Nineties Online is an e-resource offering a narrow selection of aesthetic periodicals of the 1890s, published serially in marked-up volumes with critical introductions, enhanced by an archive of historical advertisements and reviews and biographies of contributors written by experts in the field. Everything within the site is searchable, allowing users to locate, collect, and analyze visual and verbal material in both primary and secondary sources; our editorial rationale and markup are readily available for review and critique. To date only the complete runs of two periodicals--The Yellow Book (thirteen volumes) and The Pagan Review (one volume)--have been published in enhanced, searchable editions. Pending markup, The Evergreen is available on the site in downloadable and read-only formats.

The Yellow Nineties Online uses the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) version of XML to encode the "material characteristics" Beetham identifies as central to the meaning of periodicals (22). Considered in terms of their print runs, periodicals are open-ended forms (the Yellow Book Prospectus waggishly announced its circulation plans to potential subscribers as "from quarter to quarter, it is hoped, ad infinitum"). Considered in terms of their unit of sale and consumption--the daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly issue--they are end-stopped. Consequently, Beetham argues, "each number must function both as part of a series and as a free-standing unit which makes sense to the reader of the single issue" (29). She therefore takes "the text" to be "the whole run of the periodical" (26) and suggests the number or issue is the "unit definition" of its makeup, rather than "the isolated text or article" (20). This definition, which usefully reminds us that periodicals and books are very different kinds of texts, works well as a critical starting point for a digital edition of a magazine. It also highlights a problem scholars face in many repositories of digitized periodicals, which typically take "the isolated text or article" as the periodical's unit of definition.

Individual items within single issues within serial texts: like graduated Russian dolls, these elements of a periodical are nested. Similarly, to produce well-formed code, the elements of a TEI document must be appropriately nested. To encode a periodical's material characteristics adequately, however, the TEI's tendency to separate form and content must be resisted with customized markup methods, and visual material has to be translated into bibliographic and iconographic metadata. Applying Beetham's theory of the periodical genre to markup practice, The Yellow Nineties Online encodes the entire print run of The Yellow Books thirteen volumes as the serial text and treats each individual volume as a distinct unit within that textual series. Within each number, encoded items (or what Mussell names "constituent parts") include the paratextual (front and back covers, tables of contents, half titles, and advertisements), linguistic (essays, poems, stories, plays), and iconographic (visual images). Because The Yellow Books founding editors deliberately chose to segregate image and text, our markup process for this digital edition was simplified: each item type was a text within an issue within a series.

Digitally remediating The Evergreen presents the new challenge of relating blocks of text to visual material in pages combining letterpress and ornaments. Neither strictly linguistic nor iconographic features of the magazine, these hybrid decorated pages are central to The Evergreens material characteristics and its historical practices of remediation and signification. A digital edition of The Evergreen, therefore, must make textual ornaments searchable along with its letterpress and pictures. In practice, this has meant that The Evergreen volumes cannot be encoded until an adequate markup template can be prototyped for its decorative devices. Unlike full-page illustrations, textual ornaments do not come with bibliographic metadata in the form of titles or captions and their ways of signifying are often more decorative than narrative. How are we to name and describe these devices and their features consistently? To help us in this process, we have built a Database of Ornament as a digital research tool for working with The Evergreen's decorative devices, using Omeka software. This content management system allows us to upload image files for each ornament (close-up of device and full-page layout), attach bibliographic metadata (such as creator, volume, page number, type), and to develop a consistent vocabulary set, based on the technical terms used for illuminated manuscripts (drawing on Bradley, Brown, and Westwood). Once the restricted vocabulary is approved, the next stage of The Evergreen remediation process can take place: the customization of TEI markup for the encoding of page layout and decoration. The final stage of the editorial project will see the publication of the four volumes of The Evergreen in searchable format on The Yellow Nineties Online and the submission of its Resource Description Frameworks (RDFS) to the Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship (NINES) for data aggregation. Ultimately, users should be able to search, retrieve, and analyze textual ornaments and other visual material, not only across the four volumes of The Evergreen but also within the pages of other periodicals and printed books. This kind of functionality aims to support media studies across print and digital platforms, enabling new research questions, interrogations, and practices.

While all digitized periodicals are editorial projects, not all are explicit about their remediation processes and the transformations they effect. As we have seen, digitization brings unique affordances unavailable in print culture, introducing new meanings with the new forms. Katherine Hayles suggests we think of "the transformation of a print document into an electronic text as a form of 'translation' which is inevitably also an act of interpretation" (263). While transforming print objects into digital form is clearly an interpretive process, the connotations of the translation trope attach more readily to linguistic than to graphic content. The term "remediation," on the other hand, reminds us that magazines in print culture are multimedia texts incorporating McKenzie's "verbal, visual, oral, and numeric data, in the form of maps, prints, and music" When these multimedia works are digitally remediated, periodical texts may also hold "archives of recorded sound, of films, videos, and any computer-stored information" (13). The one thing a digitized periodical cannot be, however, is the material object it transforms so artfully. The interface--whether codex or screen--structures use and functionality.

Digital repositories have greatly increased access to, and knowledge of, the periodicals of print culture. The access and functionality afforded by digitization have been empowering to periodical studies, with exciting theoretical, critical, and methodological work on an expanding array of literary and popular magazines, from the canonical to the esoteric. The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, active since 1968, established the ground for working with serials in both the material and the digital archive, but it was not until the large-scale establishment of online repositories that Roberts Scholes and Sean Latham hailed "The Rise of Periodical Studies" in the PMLA (2006). As co-editors of The Modernist Journals Project, Scholes and Latham articulated sound guidelines for the digitization of periodicals:

* Start with original issues.

* Present images of all pages from cover to cover.

* Generate metadata for advertisements along with other features.

* Include the verbal parts of advertising as texts for searching to the extent that typography allows.

* On the visible pages, highlight hits in searches. ("Rise" 524)

Excellent as they are, the guidelines assume that only linguistic content can be searched; page images may display visual material, but, without metadata, illustrations and graphics are not susceptible to search and retrieval. The foregoing case study of The Evergreen suggests the addition of one more crucial guideline for the digitization of periodicals:

* Generate metadata for all visual content and make remediation processes explicit.

The modeling and prototyping of tools that will enable digitization projects to mark up the material features of periodicals may be a long and iterative process, but this work is critically needed. Without such tools our ability to make full and effective use of digitized periodicals and our knowledge of remediation in both print and digital media remain seriously restricted.

Lorraine Janzen Kooistra

Ryerson University

LORRAINE JANZEN KOOISTRA is Professor of English and Co-Director of the Centre for Digital Humanities at Ryerson University. Co-editor of The Yellow Nineties Online, she has published widely on image/text relations, Victorian print culture, and digital humanities theory and practice.

Acknowledgements

I co-edit The Yellow Nineties Online with Dennis Denisoff. I would like to acknowledge his collaboration on all our editorial decisions and practices as well as the significant contributions of our markup team over the years, with particular thanks to Reg Beatty, Constance Crompton, Ruth Knechtel, Chelsea Miya, Amy Ratelle, and Ali Versluis. I would also like to express my gratitude to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Ryerson University's Centre for Digital Humanities in the Faculty of Arts, and Ryerson University Library and Archives, for their support of this project.

Works Cited

Beetham, Margaret. "Towards a Theory of the Periodical as a Publishing Genre" Investigating Victorian Journalism. Eds. Laurel Brake, Aled Jones, and Lionel Madden. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990. 19-32.

Bergel, Giles, Alexandra Franklin, Mike Bennet, and Monica Messagyi Kaya. Broadside Ballads Online. 14 May 2015. http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk.

Bolter, Jay, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: mit Press, 1992. Web.

Bradley, John. Illuminated Manuscripts. 1905. London: Bracken Books, 1996.

Branford, V. "Old Edinburgh and The Evergreen". The Bookman 9.51 (December 1895): 88-90. ProQuest LLC. www.1890s.ca. 30 December 2014.

Brown, Michelle P. Understanding Illuminated Manuscripts: A Guide to Technical Terms. London: J. Paul Getty Museum in association with the British Library, 1994.

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