Mapping the "Mighty Maze": the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition

This paper reflects on attempts, past and present, to map the mighty maze of periodical literature. The Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition Project (ncse), seeks to achieve two key objectives. First the ncse project responds to the pressing need to preserve fragile printed items in ways which maintain their integrity as historical material objects. Electronic editions offer to new opportunities to re-present such material in a way that is, for the first time, comprehensive and freely available. ncse will create an electronic edition of six nineteenth--century periodicals. Second, ncse, aims to formulate and implement new ways of realising our current scholarly conceptualisation of these materials in electronic form. At a time when new digital editions promise to revolutionise the way resource users across the humanities work with their materials this paper explores timely questions about the role of the scholar in this process.