The Victorian Web is a hypertext project hosted at Brown University and the National University of Singapore exploring the art, literature, society, and history of the Victorian era. Edited by George P. Landow, it originated in hypermedia environments, Intermedia and Storyspace, that anticipated the World Wide Web. First created by George P. Landow, Professor of English and Art History at Brown University, the collection has been expanded by contributions from professors at Vassar College (Anthony S. Wohl), material from the Intermedia Dickens Web (Landow, Julie Launhardt, and Paul Kahnand), material from the In Memoriam Web (Landow, Jon Lanestedt), and other sources. Philip V. Allingham has been the Contributing Editor for the Victorian Web since 2000.
In contrast to archives and Web-based libraries, The Victorian Web presents its images and documents, including entire books, as nodes in a network of complex connections. In other words, it emphasizes links rather than the searches. The Victorian Web has many contributors, but unlike wikis, the Victorian Web is edited.
Originally begun in 1987 as a means of helping scholars and students in see connections between different fields, the site has expanded in its scope and vision. For example, commentary on the works of Charles Dickens is linked to his life and to contemporary social and political history, drama, religion, book illustration, and economics.
As of March, 2012, over 61,000 documents and images existed on the Victorian Web. The Victorian Web receives over 1.5 million pages views in a month.
Famous quotes containing the words victorian and/or web:
“Conscience was the barmaid of the Victorian soul. Recognizing that human beings were fallible and that their failings, though regrettable, must be humoured, conscience would permit, rather ungraciously perhaps, the indulgence of a number of carefully selected desires.”
—C.E.M. (Cyril Edwin Mitchinson)
“For us necessity is not as of old an image without us, with whom we can do warfare; it is a magic web woven through and through us, like that magnetic system of which modern science speaks, penetrating us with a network subtler than our subtlest nerves, yet bearing in it the central forces of the world.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)