Remediation as reading: digitising The Western Home Monthly

  • Hannah McGregor
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/01576895.2014.958864
Keywords: archives, digitisation, middlebrow, periodical studies, remediation

Abstract

This paper serves as a report from the field in the midst of the collaborative digitisation of The Western Home Monthly (1899–1932), a Winnipeg-based middlebrow magazine. It reflects on the methodological and theoretical challenges that face periodical scholars and on how those challenges are sometimes addressed and sometimes exacerbated by digitisation. Most importantly, it explores the unique reading perspective afforded by the process of digitising an archive, and asks how this process might help to develop new methodologies for reading periodicals that are more attentive to the media-specificity of the middlebrow magazine.

Author Biography

Hannah McGregor

Hannah McGregor is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. Her project, ‘Martha Ostenso, Middlebrow Magazines, and Digital Remediation’, examines the early twentieth-century middlebrow magazine through the lens of the simultaneous 1925 serialisation of Martha Ostenso’s classic of Canadian prairie realism, Wild Geese, in Pictorial Review and The Western Home Monthly. Nested within the EMiC UA Collaboratory, this project is an interdisciplinary and collaborative undertaking that bridges the areas of periodical studies, middlebrow studies, Canadian literature and digital humanities. Hannah completed her PhD at TransCanada Institute at the University of Guelph in 2013, where her research focused on contemporary white Canadian women’s representations of distant suffering. Her work has been published in English Studies in Canada, University of Toronto Quarterly, Canadian Literature and the International Journal of Canadian Studies.

Published
2014-09-23
How to Cite
McGregor H. (2014) “Remediation as reading: digitising The Western Home Monthly”, Archives & Manuscripts, 42(3), pp. 248-257. doi: 10.1080/01576895.2014.958864.
Issue
Vol 42 No 3 (2014): Special Issue: Literary archives, materiality and the digital
Section
Articles

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