Between hard covers and the “cloud”: Is a canon to be found?

The essay sums up the results also of a query, once it refers to a work in progress, developed over two years, in the scope of the World Cultures in English. Digital Humanities, Libraries, Schools, Social Development research project, of ULICES. Although the emerging field of Digital Humanities seems to be mostly dedicated to the possibilities of analysing big data located in the “cloud”, for producing knowledge from that standing point and the analysis of those data, I have wondered in a different direction, even though still taking advantage from the growing field that is offered to Victorianists by digital access and databases. My starting point was the University of Lisbon School of Arts and Humanities Library and the critical issue the process of canon formation. It is unquestionable that this process is closely connected with libraries, in the sense that these are sites where choices are made resulting from policies of books acquisition and donation acceptance, and where librarians feel the pressure of space management. The current research project I am involved in aims at inquiring if one can define a University of Lisbon School of Arts and Humanities Library’s canon, concerning the collections in English, within the framework of British Victorian women writers. The research process included the access to the online and manual catalogues, and the Library’s deposit fund, the so-called “Ancient Book”. At this stage, the Digital Humanities research tools proved to be useful. It was fair to ask if, in a contemporary library, print is the sole content to be approached, when a vast digital content is available to the reader. Growing access to digital databases, e-books, audio-books and academic journals from the Library, or, for that matter, accessed at a distance, has to be taken into account, as well as its inclusion in nets of knowledge created to connect similar institutions, once they expand the scope of the information at reader’s community disposal, challenging the traditional concept of literary canon. On a second level, my essay aims at inquiring if Digital Humanities will reveal researchers a different Victorian Era women writing than the one we have known till now. Although an unstable environment, the essay stresses the fact that digital sources replicate the paper-based canon, frustrating expectations of researchers that they might broaden it.