Welcome to The Victoria Press Circle! This is the first site to collect and distribute data about the Victoria Press—a feminist printing house founded in 1860 in London. For more information about the Press and the research behind this project, visit the About page.
The Victoria Press Circle’s open-access website displays interactive network visualizations, constructed in Cytoscape, of those involved in the Press. This section of the site uses co-publication to recreate the social network around the Press.
The database allows users to search the contents of almost two hundred books and issues of periodicals, all printed by women at the Victoria Press. You can browse the data by contribution, by person, or by publication. Within these tables, you can filter the data by categories including gender and genre, and see statistics. Clicking on a person’s name will reveal all of their contributions, while clicking on a publication title will show contributions within that publication. All of my data is also freely available and downloadable in .csv format for other researchers to access and use.
I wrote this blog while I was entering the data for the graphs and database above. It focuses on interesting political arguments and touching anecdotes that I found as I read through the texts of the Victoria Press.
About Miranda Marraccini: I'm the Digital Pedagogy Librarian at the University of Michigan, where I teach students and faculty how to employ digital tools and research methods. Before beginning this position, I completed my PhD in the Department of English at Princeton University and was Princeton’s Center for Digital Humanities Graduate Fellow for 2017-2018.
I would like to thank Jean Bauer, Natalia Ermolaev, Ben Hicks, Rebecca Sutton Koeser, and Xinyi Li for their generous help in developing this site. Thank you to Jim Mussell of the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition for sharing the initial EWJ data. Thank you to Harry Kalodner for the web design.