Virtual Victorians​:

​the digital annex

Figure 3. 
Reprintings of Charles MacKay's "The Inquiry" in nineteenth-century American newspapers. The state boundaries here are from 1870, about mid-way through the text's life in the press, though these boundaries shifted considerably during the decades the text circulated. This map was prepared by Viral Texts Project intern Laura Eckstein, an undergraduate at Haverford College.

Figure 1. Reprintings of "Health Hints—Follies" in nineteenth-century American newspapers. The state boundaries here are from 1870, about mid-way through the text's life in the press, though these boundaries shifted considerably during the decades the text circulated. This map was prepared by Viral Texts Project intern Laura Eckstein, an undergraduate at Haverford College.

Supplementary materials

Figure 7 (click image to expand). Reprintings of “Interesting Statistics” in newspapers before 1861 represented across the network from figure 4. In this case, the darker nodes are newspapers that reprinted MacKay’s poem, while the lighter nodes are newspapers that did not. An interactive version of this network graph can be found at http://viraltexts.org/networks/1836to1860-InterestingStats/index.html

Figure 6 (click image to expand). Reprintings of Charles MacKay’s “The Inquiry” in newspapers before 1861 represented across the network from figure 4. In this case, the darker nodes are newspapers that reprinted MacKay’s poem, while the lighter nodes are newspapers that did not. An interactive version of this network graph can be found at http://viraltexts.org/networks/1836to1860-Inquiry/index.html

Figure 5 (click image to expand). Detail of the network graph above.

Figure 4 (click image to expand). A network model of pre-1861 viral texts. The nodes (the circles) represent individual newspapers, while the edges (the lines between circles) represent texts shared by the newspapers they connect. The edges are weighted based on how many texts two papers share. In order to reduce clutter in the image, I filtered the edges so that only relatively strong connections appear. Thus even a very thin line represents several hundred shared texts between publications, while a thick line represents thousands of shared texts.  Nodes are larger or smaller based on their “degree,” which is a measure of how connected they are to other nodes—in this case, of how many texts they print that other newspapers also print. The curve of the lines attempts to represent the direction of connections—in this case determined by time of reprintings—though that measure is imprecise at best, as we cannot know simply from the days printed whether one newspaper actually got a given piece from a particular other newspaper. The colors in this graph represent communities of periodicals that frequently shared texts. An interactive version of this graph can be found at http://viraltexts.org/networks/1836to1860/index.html

The original picture posted to the "Twogirlsandapuppy" Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/Twogirlsandapuppy. The campaign also received wide media coverage, including several outlets interested in how we might contextualize this event within a wider understanding of viral media. See Rebecca J. Rosen’s Atlantic piece, “The Viral-Media Prof Whose Kids Got 1 Million Facebook Likes (and a Puppy)” , Radio Boston’s “From Hawthorne To Facebook: How One Social Media Scholar Got Schooled” (), or this interview on CBC’s Q.

Readers, we got them a puppy.

by Ryan Cordell

“Viral Textuality in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Newspaper Exchanges”