News & Events

This is one in a series of Best of Research News. This story was originally published in May 2006 and has been updated.

Thanks to two Ryerson researchers, it is possible to step back in time 120 years. The virtual tool that facilitates the journey: 1890s Online (www.1890s.ca), a digital site that documents the culture, politics, people and events that defined British fin-de-siècle culture.

Launched at a Ryerson-hosted symposium on digitizing humanities-related materials, the site was developed by Dennis Denisoff, chair of the Department of English, and English professor Lorraine Janzen Kooistra. Together, the faculty members created an online resource that gives scholars, students and others an unprecedented glimpse into the "yellow '90s." Known as a decade of significant developments in printing, publishing and the arts, the 1890s were characterized by modernist aesthetic developments that ran the gamut from mainstream consumer culture to decadent painting and poetry.

In fact, the first stage of the 1890s Online project involved electronically archiving the entire print runs of the Pagan Review, of which only two hard-copies are known to exist, and The Yellow Book, a seminal periodical that greatly influenced the Decadent Movement in Britain. The Yellow Book also reflected the literary scene more generally, publishing work by notable figures such as W.B. Yeats, Kenneth Grahame and John Buchan.

With the assistance of undergraduate students in the Arts and Contemporary Studies program, and graduate students in the Literatures of Modernity, and Communication and Culture programs, Denisoff and Janzen Kooistra plan to add even more historical information to their website, as well as images and audio files of speeches and music. Eventually, users will be able to "travel" through 1890s London and see, for example, where key figures of The Yellow Book community were during important historical events. 

"The 1890s Online site will become a storage house of archival material that is otherwise not readily available, such as paper documents that are rapidly deteriorating. Our goal is to create an immersive experience, one in which people can actually sense the texture, weight and three-dimensionality of these important documents," says Denisoff.

Next up for the researchers: submitting their work to NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship). In addition to helping programs such as the 1890s Online have mutually compatible search technologies, NINES is also a committee of international scholars that reviews projects to ensure they meet the highest level of scholarship.

The 1890s Online, however, is only one part of a larger initiative supported by Ryerson's Centre for Digital Preservation and Research. Housed within the Department of English, the centre represents a critical mass of "born-digital scholarship" directed by faculty members. In addition to the 1890s Online, a number of researchers have recently begun working on the Children's Literature Archive, which will serve as both an online and traditional archive. Other projects are also in development.

"These archival projects will serve as tremendous resources for our students," Denisoff says, "particularly for undergraduates who will enter our new bachelor's program when it starts in fall 2011."

The project has been funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Ryerson Research Chair program and a pedagogy grant from the Digital Media Projects Office.

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