What has intrigued and surprised me most about this course so far is the existence of an online database like COVE itself. It seems brilliant to me that that the minds behind the body scholarship on a pre-digital era have fully embraced the digital in this way. To me, COVE demonstrates not only the importance of digital archives for the way it makes the obscure accessible (albeit for a small fee), but also for the way it harnesses the tools of the internet to enhance the scholarship being done. The technological affordances of a platform like COVE allow for the things like the critical annotations within the texts, gallery exhibits, maps, and timelines. Diving into these tools and learning how to make the most out of COVE is something I am most looking forward to in this course. As I said in my introduction on Zoom today, I’m most interested in establishing a sort of continuity between the visual cultures of the present and Modernist eras that I have previously studied with the Victorian era we will be studying this semester. I believe that the digital tools on COVE will be helpful in facilitating that work.

I am also interested in the production of illustrations of the Victorian period. What technologies were available to them? What methods and technologies were developed during this period for the purposes of mass production? How did all this affect the texts themselves? From my cursory exploration of COVE, I saw quite a bit of information on these topics so I’m excited to learn more about that as well.