Reading Under a Big Tent

Megan Ward (bio)
Oregon State University

A review of Whitson, Roger. Steampunk and Nineteenth-Century Digital Humanities: Literary Retrofuturisms, Media Archaeologies, Alternate Histories. Routledge, 2017.

The field of digital humanities has had a contentious relationship with the idea of the “big tent,” or a widely inclusive approach that embraces a variety of disciplines, methodologies, and theories. On one hand, pitching such a big tent seems a way toward a more diverse set of practices. On the other hand, academic expertise is sometimes defined by the very smallness of the tent. Roger Whitson’s Steampunk and Nineteenth-Century Digital Humanities is an ambitious, interdisciplinary work that stakes out a very big tent. It ranges from nineteenth-century theories of labor and mechanical calculation to present-day steampunk novels, art, and fandom, approaching these texts from a blend of theoretical perspectives captured by the book’s subtitle: “literary retrofuturisms, media archaeologies, alternate histories.”

I suspect that – just one paragraph in – readers of this review already have an opinion about this methodological and historical range. And I think that Whitson’s book will appeal deeply to those who find this approach exciting, though I doubt that it will change skeptics’ minds. Whitson unites his disparate approaches under the term “steampunk methodology,” meaning that steampunk’s anachronistic, imaginative repurposings of Victorian culture offer a new kind of scholarly practice. Steampunk, he argues, gives us a new reading practice, one that isn’t constrained by historical period or close reading but instead gives us access to “a startlingly diverse set of narratives about the nineteenth century, themselves a consequence of the objects, cultures, signals, and interfaces used to access that history” (5). I find this to be the most exciting part of Whitson’s project. It opens up an energizing range of possibilities for studying the past in the presentist mode that has recently garnered much attention in Victorian literary studies (see, for instance, “V21 Forum”).

Whitson practices this methodology in order to create the “nineteenth-century digital humanities” of the book’s title, a back-and-forth process between Victorian studies, digital humanities, and European nineteenth-century culture. At some points, this proves to be digital humanities practiced in ways influenced by nineteenth-century culture, as when Whitson advocates for a non-human form of digital labor informed by Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England. At other times, this means digital humanities practices that study the nineteenth-century, which might include a digital forum for the Journal of Victorian Culture Online about baking from Victorian recipes or Lego enthusiasts re-making Charles Babbage’s difference engine. While each instance is creative and intriguing, the concept of “nineteenth-century digital humanities” would be more compelling if it were more cohesive methodologically across the book as a whole. For instance, Whitson’s reading of the nineteenth-century origins of non-human digital labor is evocative and would be even stronger if it were better connected to the other chapters. As this chapter is bookended by a chapter on geologic time and one on steampunk fandom, it left me with a sense of great possibility for this approach but without a clear payoff.

Some readers will enjoy Whitson’s engagement with a wide range of materials, creators, and theories. For me, that is the crux of this book: it offers a methodology that depends upon historical, textual, and theoretical breadth, and that breadth challenges a more traditional approach to scholarship predicated on depth. Whitson’s method and content are deliberate and well thought through, as he sees both the fields of digital humanities and Victorian studies as unnecessarily limited by historical period and by audience. For him, steampunk is a way to undo those limitations, to open up these fields through anachronism.

This leads me to Whitson’s most provocative claim: that scholarship should look outside the academy for interlocutors, inspiration, and even education. He argues that “publics are already participating in the digital humanities” by “discussing nineteenth-century history on Twitter chats and Google Hangouts, by writing steampunk novels published electronically on Kindle or on individual blogs, and by constructing steampunk technologies displayed at hobbyist and engineering conferences” (6). I find myself hard-pressed to see this as evidence of scholarship, as the intellectual work that Whitson cites tends to be smart and earnest but does not necessarily engage with debates or technologies current in the digital humanities. I admire, however, that Whitson puts his ethos into practice in each chapter, looking to steampunk hobbysists, activists, role players, bloggers, artists, writers, and makers for theories of temporality, materiality, and identity. He interviews steampunk fans, for instance, to argue that scholars of Victorian culture can “lear[n] from the ways steampunk fans appropriate and complicate historical knowledge to make it applicable to their lives” through cosplay, performance, panel discussions, and online chat (164).

This is not to say, however, that Steampunk itself is not grounded in traditional scholarship. Whitson carefully frames his arguments within contemporary scholarship and employs concepts from media archaeology theorists such as Friedrich Kittler and Jussi Parikka. Traditional scholars of Victorian literature and culture might assume that this book isn’t for them, but that isn’t necessarily the case. Whitson grounds steampunk culture in original readings of Victorian figures such as Charles Babbage, Isabella Bird, and Friedrich Engels as well as in discussions of online platforms for Victorian studies, such as BRANCH and JVC Online. At the same time, scholars of contemporary culture will also find much to enjoy in the discussions of steampunk novels, art, activism, and digital media.

The book opens with an investigation of machines and time, offering the most cohesive, in-depth exploration of method and text. The first chapter examines temporality in many difference engines, arguing that the industrial efficiency of Charles Babbage’s nineteenth-century mechanical calculator gets revised in William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s famous 1990 steampunk fiction and in various Babbage engine remakes from the nineteenth century to the present. Chapter Two continues to examine mechanization, first reading Ken Liu’s The Grace of Kings (2015) to develop a steampunk understanding of the way that culture impacts technological development. Whitson contrasts this reading with Isabella Bird’s Chinese Pictures (1900), which, he argues, portrays China as Britain’s ghostly, pre-industrial alternative. In these two chapters, ideas, texts, and objects are in fascinating conversation across time. Whitson weaves together a remarkable breadth of texts, historical moments, and concepts, but there is still a clear thread to follow as we see the multifaceted effects of industrial time.

The middle of the book shifts focus, moving toward a more diffuse series of topics united by activism. Chapter Three begins with nineteenth-century Scottish geologist James Hutton’s idea that geological mechanisms extend well beyond the time of human understanding. Whitson reads China Miéville’s novel Iron Council (2004), which, he argues, uses computing as a form of human revolutionary action. The chapter concludes with steampunk paintings and repurposing to show different strategies for computing in the face of ecological change. Chapter Four, like Chapter Three, offers invigorating readings, this time in service of the question of labor in steampunk repurposing. Beginning with a reading Friedrich Engels’s theory of labor as a cybernetic blend of human and machine, Whitson moves to Neal Stephenson’s critique of labor in the 1995 neo-Victorian novel The Diamond Age. He concludes with a discussion of steampunk engineers as an alternative to the capitalist-driven Maker Movement, in their emphasis of ecologies over individual profit. The middle section exemplifies both the strengths and weaknesses of Whitson’s approach: the range is admirable, but sometimes it comes at the expense of sustained analysis.

The final chapter makes the most explicit case for steampunk as an anachronistic methodology by showing it already at work in steampunk fan communities. Using interviews with activists, bloggers, and fans, Whitson argues that steampunk constitutes a queer public – but one that, he emphasizes, is imperfect and subject to oppression. Given this steampunk model, the final section asks how nineteenth-century digital humanities might enable various publics to participate in Victorian scholarship. “Scholarship” here is conceived very broadly – more broadly than I’m comfortable with, but nonetheless in a way that makes sense given the chapters that have come before. For Whitson, interacting with Victorian literature and culture through hobbies, cosplay, and online discussions offers ways to enrich Victorian studies and make it relevant to a broader audience. In the face of an almost non-existent job market and declining English majors, this may be a way to make scholarly work more publicly engaging.

Finally, the epilogue picks up the thread of temporal frameworks from the beginning of the book, looking to the posthuman Victorian history evidenced in steampunk video games such as Sunless Sea and Bloodborne. Together, these chapters examine the ways that steampunk’s anachronisms and uses of technology might help us imagine different kinds of nineteenth-century studies, including rereading familiar nineteenth-century texts in light of their contemporary remaking. In this way, Whitson writes in the tradition of books such as Jay Clayton’s Charles Dickens in Cyberspace, which helped inaugurate Neo-Victorian studies. Steampunk offers a significant methodological contribution to that field.

Ultimately, I want to emphasize this book’s ambition and creativity. This is not Whitson’s first book; he also co-authored William Blake and the Digital Humanities. Nonetheless, Steampunk and Nineteenth-Century Digital Humanities is a bold venture, showing impressive range in roaming across periods, media, and theories in order to reveal complex pathways connecting the Victorian period to our own.

Works Cited

• “V21 Forum on Strategic Presentism.” Victorian Studies, Vol. 59, No. 1, Autumn 2016.
• Whitson, Roger. Steampunk and Nineteenth-Century Digital Humanities: Literary Retrofuturisms, Media Archaeologies, Alternate Histories. Routledge, 2017.
• Whitson, Roger, and Jason Whittaker. William Blake and the Digital Humanities: Collaboration, Participation, and Social Media. Routledge, 2013.