We are delighted to announce an invitation for academics at UK universities and Higher Education Institutions to collaborate with the British Library on jointly supervised PhD studentships funded through the AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnerships scheme. The Library is seeking proposals for two PhD projects, to start in October 2021, one of which will be based on our nineteenth-century newspaper collections.

The Royal York newspaper ran for nineteen issues May-September 1827

While digitising poor condition London-based nineteenth-century newspapers  for the Heritage Made Digital Newspapers project, we became intrigued by the large number of relatively short-lived newspaper titles that fitted within our digitisation criteria, of which so little was known. Newspaper history, and consequently digitisation policy, tends towards the more successful titles that had longer runs. There is much logic to this, but what are we leaving out if we overlook 'failures', and are they really 'failures' at all? There was an opportunity for some fresh thinking about our newspaper heritage.

Entitled Short-lived Newspapers: Reassessing Success and Failure in the 19th Century Press, the CDP will concentrate on newspapers that lasted less than five years, chiefly those held by the British Library (we have digitised some 200 short-run titles as part of Heritage Made Digital). While the proportion of British nineteenth-century newspapers that lasted five years or less varied over time, it was always a significant percentage, often comprising more than half of the news publications in circulation. 

The project is concerned with exploring and questioning preconceived ideas of success and failure in the 19th century press. It should investigate whether longevity is a useful metric for measuring the success of a newspaper, and what factors impacted how long a newspaper lasted for. It should also look at large-scale data to explore patterns of ‘success’ or ‘failure’, and map these against wider political, social and technological patterns of the period.

Research areas that could be explored to analyse why some publications thrived and others did not may include, for example, taxation and censorship (particularly the implications of the Six Acts (1819), and the ‘Taxes on Knowledge’); technology and innovation, examining the impact of railways, telegraph technology, and/or new printing technologies; the shifting fashions of reading and journalism, education and literacy; working/leisure patterns or influences originating from outside the United Kingdom.

19th century newspapers lend themselves to research in the fields of newspaper history/periodicals study; cultural, political or economic history; literature; and digital humanities. The research could incorporate a range of research methods such as bibliographic research, aspects of data science, close and distant reading, and audience studies.

Academics at UK universities and Higher Education Institutions interested in this call should download information on the research theme and the application forms here: www.bl.uk/news/2020/november/cdp-call-for-hei-partners-2020.

The application deadline is 5 pm on Friday 18 December 2020.