ABOUT
As a dynamic structure, a scholarly website is always in process. Launched as a completed site in April 2024, the project emerged in two phases:
Phase One of The Yellow Nineties Online (2010-2015), edited by Lorraine Janzen Kooistra and Dennis Denisoff, was revised and absorbed into Yellow Nineties 2.0 in 2016. The initial stage of the project published digital editions of the single-volume Pagan Review (1892) and the thirteen-volume Yellow Book (1894-1897) with the support of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Standard Research Grant.
Phase Two, Yellow Nineties 2.0 (2016-2024), edited and directed by Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, was supported by a SSHRC Insight Grant. In addition to a redesigned backend and interface, Y90s 2.0 added six more digital editions: The Dial (5 volumes, published occasionally between 1889-1897), The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal (4 bi-annual volumes, 1895-97), The Green Sheaf (13 monthly issues, 1903-1904), The Pageant (2 annual volumes, 1896-97), The Savoy (2 quarterly and 6 monthly issues, 1896), and The Venture: An Annual of Art and Literature (2 annual volumes, 1903-1905).
On 18 April 2024, Toronto Metropolitan University’s Centre for Digital Humanities joined TMU Libraries, Archives, and Special Collections to celebrate the completion of Yellow Nineties 2.0 with a Symposium and Exhibition. See Launching Yellow Nineties 2.0. Yellow Nineties 2.0 is now focussed on ensuring its ongoing preservation and accessibility.
Yellow Nineties 2.0 is an open-access scholarly resource for the study of eight late-Victorian little magazines in the context of their production and reception between 1889 and 1905, a relatively brief period when the emerging periodical genre was characterized by its aspiration to be a “total work of art.” Y90s provides a reliable, searchable digital edition of the complete print run of each magazine, supported by a historical archive of promotional materials and critical reviews. The site also provides a robust editorial apparatus of born-digital scholarship (>200,000 words), with a general overview of each title and a critical introduction for each volume in its print run. Two biographical tools— over 100 peer-reviewed essays on contributors in Y90s Biographies and over 900 individual data cards in the Y90s Personography—facilitate discovery of the people and networks that created the art and literature in these avant-garde magazines. The Database of Ornament allows users to compare and analyze the textual ornaments that decorated their pages and expressed their ideas. The Y90s Classroom showcases student research and pedagogical use of the site. A series of Essays on our Process by Y90s team members self-reflexively engages with our technical, editorial, and scholarly decisions and their analogies with historical print culture.
Created in Linked Open Data (LOD), the Yellow Nineties Personography provides a searchable biographical database of contributors to late-Victorian little magazines, so that their relationships, connections, and networks can be queried, visualized, and analyzed. The data set is available for exploration and manipulation on LINCS, the Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship.
All other digital resources on the Y90s are marked up using the TEI (Textual Encoding Initiative) tagset and the RDF (Resource Description Framework) schema developed by NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship). To ensure maximum flexibility for users, Y90s makes textual materials available as virtual objects (facsimiles) in FlipBook form; in HTML for online reading; in PDF for downloading and collecting; and in XML for critical investigation and reuse. Y90s image markup is an adaptation of the iconographic proforma Julia Thomas developed for her Database of Mid-Victorian Illustration at Cardiff University. Y90s expands the “alt text” function to provide a detailed description of each visual object so that a virtual word picture is accessible to visually impaired users via the voice activation function.
All scholarly material on the site is vetted by the editor(s) and peer-reviewed by them and/or an international board of advisors. Y90s 2.0 is hosted on the Toronto Metropolitan University Libraries server and licensed with a Creative Commons 4.0 Deed: Attribution International.
The Y90s Team gratefully acknowledges the support of Toronto Metropolitan University Library Archives and Special Collections, which acquired six of the eight titles digitized on Yellow Nineties 2.0 in support of the project. We also give our profound thanks to Mark Samuels Lasner, who generously allowed us to publish digital versions of magazines, pictures, texts, and ephemera in his 1890s collection, held at the University of Delaware Libraries, Museums, and Press.
Some materials published on Yellow Nineties 2.0 contain historic references to Ryerson University, the name of the host institution for the Centre for Digital Humanities until 2022, when its name was changed to Toronto Metropolitan University in response to the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee. The Y90s team gratefully acknowledges that the land on which we live and work is the traditional territory of many nations, including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples and is now home to diverse First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples. We also acknowledge our obligation to honour the Dish with One Spoon agreement; Treaty 13 with the Mississaugas of the Credit; and the Williams Treaty signed with multiple Mississauga and Chippewa nations.
General Editor: Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, Toronto Metropolitan University Centre for Digital Humanities
Biographies Acquisitions Editor: Koenraad Claes, Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge University
Personography Editor: Alison Hedley, Toronto Metropolitan University Centre for Digital Humanities
Project Manager and Designer: Reg Beatty, Toronto Metropolitan University Centre for Digital Humanities
Collaborators
Jason Boyd, Toronto Metropolitan University
Leslie Howsam, University of Windsor
Christopher Keep, Western University
Frederick King, Dalhousie University
MJ Suhonos, Toronto Metropolitan University Library and Archives
International Advisory Board
Laurel Brake, Emerita Professor of English Literature and Print Culture, University of London
Joseph Bristow, Distinguished Professor of English, University of California Los Angeles
Constance Crompton, Canada Research Chair in Digital Humanities, University of Ottawa
Koenraad Claes, Anglia Ruskin University; Cambridge University
Linda K. Hughes, Addie Levy Professor of Literature, Texas Christian University
Mark Samuels Lasner, Senior Research Fellow, University of Delaware Library
Evanghélia Stead, University Professor, Université de Versailles St-Quentin
Margaret Stetz, Mae and Robert Professor of English, University of Delaware
Julia Thomas, Professor of English, Cardiff University
Credits
Centre for Digital Humanities, Toronto Metropolitan University
Database of Mid-Victorian Victorian Illustration (DMVI), Cardiff University
Digital Humanities Summer Institute, University of Victoria
Faculty of Arts, Toronto Metroopolitan University
MA in Literatures of Modernity, Department of English, Toronto Metropolitan University
Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press
Office of the Vice President, Research and Innovation, Toronto Metropolitan University
Research Society for Victorian Periodicals—Linda H. Peterson Fellowship
Toronto Metropolitan University Library and Archives
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
Contact: Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, Toronto Metropolitan University: ljanzen@torontomu.ca