European Migrants in the British Imagination: Victorian and Neo-Victorian Culture

Projektinformationen

VICTEUR

ID Finanzhilfevereinbarung: 884951

DOI

10.3030/884951

EK-Unterschriftsdatum 2 April 2020

Startdatum 1 September 2020

Enddatum 28 Februar 2027

Finanziert unter

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Gesamtkosten

€ 2 498 126,00

EU-Beitrag

€ 2 498 126,00

Koordiniert durch

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN, NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND, DUBLIN
Ireland

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - VICTEUR (European Migrants in the British Imagination: Victorian and Neo-Victorian Culture)

Berichtszeitraum: 2023-09-01 bis 2025-02-28

Zusammenfassung vom Kontext und den Gesamtzielen des Projekts

The VICTEUR study will combine data analytics and literary criticism to investigate representations of migrants and by migrants in Victorian and Neo-Victorian culture. This project seeks to push beyond the frontiers of current understanding of the role of migration and migrants in the dynamics of cultural change and continuity, examining intra-European migration in the Victorian period through the ‘macroscope' of text mining and the microscopes of literary scholarship. The study will use big data to address a key unanswered societal question, how does migration impact on the cultural identity of both migrant and host communities in the historical long-term.

Victorian Britain was much more diverse than we assume today. It was the target destination for large numbers of migrants from across Europe fleeing war, political turmoil and economic deprivation. VICTEUR will trace the residual impact of these cultural representations in neo-Victorian fiction, film and television, focussing on the period 2011-2016,combining methodologies from text mining, transmedia and cultural memory studies.

The project will examine in detail the relationship between gender and national and ethnic identities within the texts and the impact of authorial gender on representations of migrants by British and migrant writers. It will develop a new transhistorical and intranational model for understanding migration as a key driver of cultural development at the interface of gender, ethnicity and demography. By understanding twenty-first century adaptations and appropriations of nineteenth century texts and thematics as forms of cultural memory, this project will also illuminate the influence of the historical experience of migration on a national identity perceived as territorial, innate and unchanging.

Arbeit, die ab Beginn des Projekts bis zum Ende des durch den Bericht erfassten Berichtszeitraums geleistet wurde, und die wichtigsten bis dahin erzielten Ergebnisse

A number of the research positions have been filled and a strong team ethos is present, to see our team please visit our project website https://projectvicteur.com/victeur/. Clear governance and management structures have been implemented with collaborative online work-sharing platforms in place.

All of the research work packages have been progressing well with a number of key tasks for each work package completed, such as archival research and the development of a digital platform and an online digital catalogue.

International research conference panels and a number of conference papers have been accepted.

A project website has been designed and built. There have been a number of key dissemination activities and stakeholder engagements, such as podcast, online presentations and workshops, more details can be found on the project website. A social media presence is growing through the project's Twitter account.

Fortschritte, die über den aktuellen Stand der Technik hinausgehen und voraussichtliche potenzielle Auswirkungen (einschließlich der bis dato erzielten sozioökonomischen Auswirkungen und weiter gefassten gesellschaftlichen Auswirkungen des Projekts)

This project uses cultural analytics which enables the project to look at larger amounts of text and to look across history which was not previously conceivable and will use state of the art machine learning techniques and literary methodologies. VICTEUR is a collaboration between data analytics and humanities and will advance state of the art in research on Victorian fiction and the afterlives.

This project will progressively share its data, methods, and findings over the course of its lifespan. In the process, we will also make an unprecedentedly large dataset available to other researchers, alongside embedded tools for conducting enhanced searches, creating lexicons, generating data visualisations, and creating and exporting customised textual corpora ranging in size from single works to the dataset's entire complement of fiction.

Overview of the project