Endings: Seriality, Sustainability, and Carrying on

résumé de la communication : Readers would have realised that the end was coming for the venerable Leeds Intelligencer in 1866 as before they reached the leading article explaining why the paper was to close they first would have seen the notice that the paper’s pressroom and type were for sale.  The Leeds Intelligencer was founded as a conservative weekly in 1754 and become a bi-weekly in 1855.  In the leading article announcing its end its editor and proprietor, Christopher Kemplay, noted the need for a Conservative daily in Leeds to rival the liberal Leeds Mercury and regretted that he could not meet it with the Intelligencer.  Instead, he told his readers, he had sold the paper to a consortium of Tory grandees who had then closed it, launching the daily Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer in its place.  There was no connection between the papers yet the title signals a desire for continuity.  Even the number of first issue of the Yorkshire Post, 5928, suggested it was merely the latest in an ongoing series rather than the first issue of a new paper.

My lecture considers the awkwardness of endings in periodicals and newspapers.  Predicated on not ending, new issues taking their place in the sequences projected forward from wherever they were in the series, endings were fraught moments as editors and proprietors had to confront failure.  Sometimes endings were acknowledged, leading articles such as that in the Leeds Intelligencer accounting for the end (and providing an excuse).  But often endings were unacknowledged, the newspaper or periodical simply not appearing again and so leaving the virtual sequence, still stretching on, unrealised.  The fate of the Leeds Intelligencer points to yet another way to end: merged into another publication, its ghostly presence was tolerated for the continuity it might bring.

 My lecture considers serial endings alongside other kinds of endings.  Just as one article ends another begins, so too does one issue start after another.  Page after page, the linearity of the codex drives the reader on while the last page prompts the reader to, perhaps, reach for another book.  This discussion provides the context for my broader argument about digital sustainability.  Whereas print publications have a (fairly) efficient preservational infrastructure in formal institutions such libraries and archives and more informal such as domestic bookcases, a comparable infrastructure for digital resources is much more uneven.  Persistence takes work and what look’s like print’s ready capacity to persist depends on a world designed to allow it do so.  Digital resources require curation, and so an infrastructure of their own.  In the absence of this, I want to suggest, it is important to consider the end not as something terminal but rather an end in itself.

Keynote presentation: Pr James Mussell (University of Leeds, UK)