Centred on The Yellow Book (1894-97), The Yellow Nineties Online publishes facsimile editions of a select collection of aesthetic periodicals, together with paratexts of production and reception such as cover designs, advertising materials, and reviews. This historical material is enhanced by two kinds of peer-reviewed scholarly commentary: biographies of the periodicals’ contributors and associates and critical essays on the material by experts in the field. Both primary and secondary materials, including all visual materials, are marked up in TEI- (Textual-Encoding Initiative) compliant XML (Extensible Markup Language).

Our editorial horizon encompasses the long 1890s and the international community of authors, artists, editors, publishers, photo engravers, readers, and reviewers who contributed to the production and reception of the period’s aesthetic periodicals.

We have decided to produce editions of selected 1890s periodicals in digitized form for the following reasons: 1) their crumbling paper makes digital preservation a matter of urgency 2) their location in rare book libraries and private collections makes access difficult 3) the size and material complexities of these periodicals prohibit print editions in codex form 4) digitization allows us to situate the facsimiles of these periodicals within an enriched historical archive and peer-reviewed scholarly environment 5) computer technology empowers new ways of reading, viewing, and understanding these influential cultural artifacts and 6) mark-up language facilitates the complex searches these aesthetic objects demand, not only within The Yellow Nineties Online, but across federated sites within the NINES consortium.

Our editorial method is informed by social-text editing principles. By “text” we mean visual and verbal printed material, including non-referential physical elements such as bindings, page layouts, and ornaments. We view any text as the outcome of collaborative processes that have specific manifestations at precise historical moments.

Editorial Decisions

We have chosen the thirteen-volume Yellow Book (1894-1897) as our initial focus because it is a defining cultural document of the period. We have included the single-volume Pagan Review (1892) in this initial phase of development because of its many connections to The Yellow Book its extreme rarity (only two copies are known to us) and its expansion of the publishing context from urban London to rural Sussex. The publication of these two periodicals and their respective paratextual materials allows users to juxtapose key print documents of the aesthetic/decadent movement and the Celtic Revival and neo-paganism.

Our intention for the next stage of site development is to produce facsimile editions of The Spirit Lamp (four volumes, 1892-1893), The Evergreen (four volumes, 1895), The Dial (five volumes, published occasionally between 1889-1897), and The Savoy (two quarterly and six monthly issues, 1896).

Our theory of text as socially and collaboratively produced is made explicit in the Biographies section of the site. We aim to publish a peer-reviewed scholarly biography for every contributor—not only author and artist, but also editor, publisher, and engraver—to The Yellow Book and all other facsimile editions we publish. In order to ensure a supportive historical context of people associated in various ways with the period, we also include biographies of individuals who made significant contributions to the 1890s in the areas of culture, literature, visual art, book-design, publishing, and technological innovation.

With a view to our mixed audience of scholars, students, and the general public, we aim to provide editorial introductions and scholarly commentary for each facsimile edition we publish. Currently there is an editorial introduction for The Pagan Review and for the first six volumes of The Yellow Book, as well as more general scholarly commentary for each periodical.

Future site developments will include visualization tools that facilitate new ways of viewing objects and relationships on the site, and thus new ways to approach fin-de-siècle cultural studies.

All scholarly material on the site is vetted by the editors and peer-reviewed by them and an international board of advisors the site as a whole is peer-reviewed by NINES (Networked Interface for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship). Contributors to the site retain personal copyright in their material. The site is licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license.

Technical Decisions

Sponsored by the English Department’s Centre for Digital Humanities, The Yellow Nineties Online is housed on Ryerson University’s MS SQL server. The site combines PHP and ASP (for generating dynamic page content) with HTML.

The verbal texts of all periodicals are scanned by OCR (Optical-Character Recognition) software and checked against copy text as part of the mark-up process. Where possible, we use first-edition issues of the periodical as copy text. All visual images (including cover designs, decorated title pages, and illustrations) are photographed in 600 DPI for archival storage as tiff files, and (because of size considerations) displayed on the site as jpegs in 120 DPI. Visual images have been minimally edited using Photoshop only in cases where serious obfuscation occurred through fading or foxing.