The Nineteenth Century Serials Edition (ncse) is an edition of six nineteenth-century periodicals and newspapers: the Monthly Repository (1806-1837); Northern Star (1837-1852); Leader (1850-1860); English Woman’s Journal (1858-1864); Tomahawk (1867-1870); Publishers’ Circular (1880-1890). It is large and varied resource, containing well over 400,000 articles that originally appeared in roughly 3500 issues published during a span of 84 years. It was the result of an AHRC-funded collaboration between Birkbeck College, King's College London, Olive Software, and the British Library that ran from 2005 to the project launch in 2008. In 2017, concerned about vulnerabilities in the software, the Facsimiles component was taken offline. Shortly afterwards, work began at King's Digital Lab on a replacement viewer, launched in October 2018.
King’s Digital Lab explored the data produced by Olive as part of the earlier production process and, modifying a viewer produced for another project, developed a platform through which ncse content could be accessed once more by configuring a new server for the facsimile component, implementing a viewer with browsing and searching functionalities, and associated design interfaces. In addition, using some of the staff 10% exploratory time, some visualisations of the statistics of the periodicals were tested with project partners and added to the site. As in the 2008 edition, the 2018 Facsimiles component allows users to browse and search the six periodicals and newspapers.
Team
- James Mussel Researcher
- Laurel Brake Principal investigator
- Mark Turner Co-investigator
- Paul Caton KDL RSE team member
- Rebecca Sykes Researcher
- Robyn Jakeman Researcher