Between book and cinema: late Victorian new media

SIMON COOK

The origins of new media can be located in the late 19th

century, in the visual archive of this period. This

antecedent of today’s new media appeared first within the

pages of the printed book and article, and its origin is

related to the increasingly database style of organization

of print media at this time. The organizational form of

the visual archive that appeared within such printed

pages, however, can also be connected to developments in

the moral sciences, in particular, the investigation by

physiologists of the material foundations of both vision

and of thought. As both the eye and the brain became

part of the same physical model, so the visual archive

came to include both the database itself, and its

organizational frame, within a single image.

INTRODUCTION

The term ‘new media’ encompasses a range of media

types, related apparently only by their relationship to

computers and digitization. As a result of this diversity,

most contemporary accounts of new media are at best

partial in their purchase, and at worst confused. Thus,

for example, we can note the dichotomy between those

who celebrate electronic text as at the heart of new

media, and those who ignore it completely. In this

paper it will be argued that, through a historical

account of the origins of new media, a shared database

form can be shown to stand behind much of the

apparent diversity of today’s electronic forms of word

and image. The argument of this paper is that in the

late 19th century certain crucial changes occurred in the

organizational form of the printed text, the nature of

literacy and the nature of visuality. These changes had

different origins, but their common effect was to give

rise to a new database media. From the pages of the

printed text there emerged a particular form of visual

database technology, which although now eclipsed by

the technologies that are held to have given rise to the

moving image, is of more significance for an

understanding of both the origin and the meaning of

our contemporary new media. Thus, the full

significance of new visual forms of late 19th-century

information organization can only be properly

appreciated if we also take on board the

transformations of printed media at the same moment.

It is only by passing through the printed database that

developed in this period that we can fully understand

the full nature and extent of the emerging visual

database; for ultimately 20th-century database media

emerged at a moment of convergence of the late

Victorian scientific book with the late Victorian visual

archive.

While the identification of the database as the

fundamental characteristic of new media owes much to

Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media (2001), the

attempt to identify the origins of database media in the

late 19th century proceeds from an engagement with

the limitations of this book. For Manovich, the language

of the database is a purely visual language, and electronic

text is consequently discounted. Furthermore, Manovich

considers this language to derive from the language of

cinema, and thus imposes an overly restrictive

interpretative framework over the notion of the

database. Indeed, cinema is normally associated with a

narrative, not a database, organization of images.1 This

paper, then, attempts to revise Manovich’s conception

of database media as arising out of the cinema, and to

provide a more comprehensive historical account of the

origins of new media as database media, relying on

printed rather than moving images. The first step in

constructing a revised account of the database is to note

the extent to which its emergence as a key social

institution occurred, not in the 1920s as Manovich

appears to believe, but some half-century previously.

THE VICTORIAN ARCHIVE

In a study of the ‘fantasy of Empire’ in late Victorian

fiction, The Imperial Archive, Thomas Richards (1993)

discusses the myth of total knowledge and the reality of

what he terms the first ‘knowledge explosion’. Richards

describes the British Empire as ‘the first cybernetic

empire’ in history; that is to say, the first empire that

was held together more by information than by mere

physical power. ‘All the great historical empires, ancient

Simon Cook studied late 19th-century intellectual history at the University of Cambridge. He is currently a postdoctoral Mellon fellow at Duke University,

where he is working on a book-length manuscript investigating the economic dimensions of visual modernism and the visual dimensions of late 19th-century

economic science.

Visual Studies, Vol. 19, No. 1, 2004

ISSN 1472-586X printed/ISSN 1472–5878 online/04/010060–12 # 2004 International Visual Sociology Association

DOI: 10.1080/1472586042000204852

and modern, have had to come to terms with the

problem of control at a distance’, writes Richards, but it

was only in the middle of the 19th century that people

in Britain began to envisage ‘an empire not united by

force but by information’. Thus, ‘fifty years before

Norbert Wiener coined the term ‘‘cybernetics’’, British

writers were examining in detail the role information

played in legitimizing the British Empire’ (Richards

1993: 1, 7).

Richards further points to the ways in which the history

of Empire and the history of the Victorian sciences were

intertwined in the generation of this knowledge

explosion. He notes how ‘from all over the globe the

British collected information about the countries they

were adding to their map. They took censuses,

produced statistics. They made vast lists of birds.’ But

of course all this paper shuffling required keeping track

of – ‘it required some kind of archive for it all’. Thus,

from the ‘beginning of the new imperialism of the

1860s, the British viewed their empire as an immense

administrative challenge … the administrative core of

the British Empire was built around knowledge-

producing institutions like the British Museum, the

Royal Geographical Society, the India Survey, and the

universities’ (Richards 1993: 1–4, 13). For Richards it is

the British Museum in the 1870s, whose ‘capillaries …

traversed the British Empire’, but whose staff worked

against an ever-growing backlog of uncatalogued

artefacts, which best symbolizes the crisis produced by

the Victorian knowledge explosion. Institutions such as

the British Museum existed in a permanent state of

crisis with regard to their ability to organize their ever-

growing stocks of artefacts and information. The wealth

of ever-accumulating data constantly threatened to

overwhelm the capacities of Victorian administrators in

a veritable embarrassment of fragmentary knowledge.

Thus, while improving technologies of transport and

communication within the Empire facilitated the

gathering of facts on the ground, this increasingly

demanded improvements in the technologies that

organized and presented such knowledge.

Richards’ primary concern is with the myth of empire

in late Victorian fiction, and he is interested in

displaying the gulf between the ideals of imperial

information organization, and its reality; consequently,

he fails to note that the increasing redundancy of older

forms of the ‘Imperial Archive’ like the British Museum

in the 1870s went hand in hand with the construction

of more sophisticated technologies of information

organization and analysis. Historians of science have

noted the connection between the late Victorian

knowledge explosion and the emergence of the

scientific laboratory. As the old guard of natural

historians who had inhabited the British Museum

passed into obscurity, the young Turks of the day, the

new professional natural scientists like Thomas Huxley,

moved into new sites of knowledge production in

which ‘nature’ could be cut up, measured and

experimented upon under an almost military regime of

laboratory conditions. The move from museum to

laboratory, which in London can be identified with the

opening of the South Kensington site in the early 1870s,

signals the emergence of a new professional breed of

scientists and a more active approach to the study of

nature. In the words of Huxley’s most recent

biographer, Adrian Desmond, the establishment of the

South Kensington site ‘would symbolise the intellectual

shift in the 19th century – the switch from museum

display to that new knowledge manufacturing-site, the

laboratory’ (Desmond 1998: 394).

Among historians of the natural sciences it is by now a

commonplace that the history of the laboratory is

intimately connected with the fortunes of empire and

information overload. Indeed, at least one such

historian has attempted to connect the replacement of

the museum by the laboratory with a general project

among the natural sciences to mechanize their

epistemological techniques; a project that supposedly

culminates with the cinema as the ultimate

mechanization of information display (Schaffer 1994).

But while such a narrative critically illuminates the

nature of the laboratory, it at the same moment

uncritically accepts an implicit vision of the progress of

mechanized forms of representation towards a

predetermined end-point in the technology of the

moving image. In order to construct a history of new

media we need to start from the fact that not only was

the cinema but one form of image organization among

many, but that the laboratory was but one form of

response among many to the knowledge explosion

facing the sciences and humanities of the late 19th

century.

While the emergence of the scientific laboratory in the

last decades of the 19th century can be understood as

one response to the knowledge explosion of this time,

clearly it could account for just a small proportion of

the ever-growing mountain of facts that had to be

organized and analysed. Not all facts could be cut

up, boxed and placed in the physical space of the

laboratory. The statistical collections of social scientists

Late Victorian new media 61

and government agencies, for example, existed only as

raw data, numbers to be organized and analysed to be

sure, but confined forever in a virtual space. But the

late Victorian archive contained not only numbers, but

also words and images; and in order to understand the

significance of the visual archives that stand as

antecedent to today’s new media, it is necessary to first

explore the printed databases from which they emerged.

THE BOOK AS VISUAL DATABASE

The terminology of that vast and ever-growing

collective database, the World Wide Web, is itself

suggestive of a historical textual tradition that has now

found a new dimension as new media: we browse web

‘pages’, but we ‘scroll’ down those pages when they are

longer than the height of our screen. Such terminology

brings together within a single digital application terms

derived from two older textual forms – the codex, and

the scroll. Amongst historians and theoreticians of

literacy a debate has been conducted for many

years now concerning the long-term history of

communication. Torturous as these arguments

sometimes are, the basic conclusion is straightforward

enough: put simply, the history of writing would

appear to entail, over the course of many centuries, a

transformation from the ear to the eye as the primary

organ of human culture. From such a perspective

electronic text can be viewed as a culminating – or at

least highly advanced – episode in the history of

literacy; and from such a perspective it is precisely the

visual nature of electronic text that is of significance, for

electronic text with its pathways of underlined

hyperlinks constitutes a form of writing in which

meaning can no longer be conveyed simply by speaking

and hearing. To declare new media to be

predominantly a visual medium need in no way entail

that words are not an integral part of electronic

communication: the challenge is not to present an

account of new media in which either words or images

are excluded, but precisely to provide an account in

which both have their place.

There is a case to be made for regarding a standard

searchable web page as merely an advance in database

technology upon the book, just as the book was an

advance upon the codex. Let us return to the new

media technologies of scrolling web pages, and consider

the following contrast involving the two historically

quite distinct antecedent media. Classical scholars have

noted that when Plato quotes Homer, his quotation is

rarely accurate.2 A forceful contrast emerges when we

turn from the Homeric scroll to the pages of the

Christian bible (a literary work which from its origin

appeared in codex form), the sentences of which have

long been associated with numbered references,

therefore facilitating rapid search and exact quotation.

For a culture that relies upon the scroll to preserve its

literary traditions, searching for exact places in a work

is far too time-consuming to be considered worthwhile;

the convention of precise quotation arises only when

the media of the written word can support such a

convention. Put another way, the codex constitutes a

far more efficient database than the scroll.

Of course the book itself should not be regarded as a

monolithic media. In terms of the ease of reference of

the written text it is a rather startling fact that only in

the middle ages did the convention arise in Europe of

placing spaces between words; a convention that

appears to be related to the transition from reading out

loud to reading silently – a cultural shift of great

salience in the gradual transition from oral to visual

literary culture (Saenger 1997). Indeed the scholarly

book as we know it is a fairly recent arrival, dating back

no earlier than the late 19th century. Contents pages

developed slowly from the first century or so of

printing onwards, but the great technological leap that

truly transforms the book from a text meant to be read

from cover to cover into a truly useful and searchable

database – the ‘back-of-the-book index’ – appears to

have been made only in the 1870s.3 Of course, in

18th-century England, Dr Johnson compiled a modern

dictionary, but the principles of systematic

compendiums are as old as the profession of the scribe;

the novelty in the late 19th century was not a

classification scheme of supposedly universal

proportions, but rather the crafting of a universal form

of self-classification through compartmentalizing the

whole body of the book into main text, contents, index,

footnotes and bibliography.

The 1870s witnessed further changes in the

construction of the printed work, changes that may be

described as of a multimedia nature. One of the first

‘big sellers’ in the history of printing were emblem

books, in which word and printed image were

juxtaposed across two pages, and since the Renaissance

scientific books such as anatomy texts had contained

illustrations. What changed in scientific books and

papers from the 1870s onwards was not, then, the

inclusion of illustrations, but rather the nature of such

illustrations. As Lorraine Daston has shown in her

studies of scientific objectivity, in this decade the artists’

62 S. Cook

sketch began to be replaced by machine-rendered

images. Daston connects this shift in scientific imagery

with a new ethos of natural science in which the human

observer was increasingly seen as untrustworthy and

liable to error, and in which the ideal of objective

measurement and recording became associated with the

unbiased and disinterested work of the machine

(Daston 1992; Daston and Galison 1992).

At the same moment that science turned from human

rendering to machine recording of visual observation, a

further change occurred in the kind of images included

in scientific texts: it was at just this time that graphical

recording and diagrammatic illustration entered into

scientific writings. The new vogue for the ‘graphical

method’ can certainly be connected to Daston’s

argument that at this time attempts were made to purge

the human element from science – for graphs are

perhaps the ultimate machine drawings which, even if

actually drawn by human hands, are (at least in 19th-

century theory) devoid of any non-objective element.

Furthermore, the ‘absolute’ language of graphs (what

Daston describes as their ‘aperspectival’ nature), free

from the vagaries of particular national languages, lent

to them a significant value in an increasingly

international scientific culture. The rise of graphs must

also be connected to what Ian Hacking has dubbed the

19th century’s ‘avalanche of printed numbers’ – the

ever-increasing collection of social statistics, and thus it

is in the texts of the social sciences that graphs find

their most pronounced early usage (Hacking 1990: 3).4

Statistics may be presented in tabular or in graphical

form, but it is the latter that that most readily allows

the eye to make sense of them. Just at the same time

that the back-of-the-book index was introduced, so too

we find that a new form of visual database imagery was

introduced within the pages of certain scientific books;

clearly, in the late 19th century the technology of the

book was rapidly evolving into a database technology.

The late 19th-century scientific or scholarly printed

work was in many ways a halfway house between the

more traditional printed book, on the one hand, and

the new technologies of visual display that would

emerge over the next few decades, on the other. From

its traditional form as a medium between spoken words

and a distant audience, this new kind of printed work

had severed all connection between speech and ear and

become a purely visual mode of conveying information

(it is hard to envisage anyone reading out loud to an

audience the contents of the Oxford English Dictionary).

This new visuality went hand in hand with the

impersonal, disinterested and objective ethos that over

the same period become dominant within scientific

cultures. Further, the advent of the back-of-the-book

index at this time gave an important impetus in this

transformation of the printed book from a narrative

form that began on page 1 and ended on the last page,

to a readily searchable database of information. The

printing of diagrams and graphs side by side with

explanatory text is part and parcel of this transition

towards a more visual and database form of printed

matter.

In the printing of a diagram on a page facing a page of

printed text it would appear that the late 19th-century

scientific book was bringing into close proximity two

distinct database technologies, that of word and image.

Furthermore, print media had by this time become a

visual media. Ultimately, technologies of word and

image, and visual and print media remained distinct,

yet in this period they began to converge. Just as today,

on our computer screens, as well as on advertisements,

word and image appear to merge, so the late 19th-

century proximity of word and image within the pages

of the book or journal article (as well as the late 19th-

century advertisement and poster) was also an

interpenetration of these two media. Indeed, the

convergence of word and image that is trumpeted today

as the advent of computer ‘multimedia’ has its origins

in precisely this 19th-century convergence of visuality

and literacy. But this convergence, grounded in

interpenetration, was not so much a product of vision

becoming text, since the text had itself become visual,

but of visuality itself changing over the course of the

19th century, and visual media increasingly taking on

the characteristics of a database media. The grounds of

the convergence of printed and visual media are to be

found in the emergence of a shared common ground of

a new, database, media. But to understand this crucial

point it is necessary to explore, and also supplement,

some of the extensive literature on the history of both

visuality and literacy.

THE SUBJECT OF NEW MEDIA

In order to trace the convergence of print and visual

media in the later 19th century, we need not spend time

on the protracted scholarly debates concerning the last

two millennia of the history of literacy. We may note in

passing that the ancient Greek enlightenment has been

attributed to the adoption of the Phoenician alphabet,

and that the European Renaissance has been

approached in a similar fashion by those who have seen

Late Victorian new media 63

the printing press as heralding the emergence of a

scientific diagrammatic consciousness; and we may note

that both of these claims have been as rigorously

contested as they have been advocated.5 It is sufficient

for our purposes to appreciate that despite all the

sound and fury of these debates one point emerges as

incontestable. As the historian of religion W. A.

Graham puts it, too simplistic a contrast of oral and

written culture ‘as embodiments of different modes of

thinking ignores important continuities between the

two’, which is to say that despite the gradual

displacement of orality by writing over two millennia,

the advent and spread of printing in Europe

may be the only historical example in which

the revolutionary potential of writing and a

related shift away from oral modes of

discourse have been realized in an extensive

and ultimately radical way. (Graham 1993: 17)

Furthermore, the full effects of this transformation had

to await further the developments in print technology

of the 19th century that finally allowed cheap – and

therefore truly mass – print production.6

This definitive emergence of a purely visual literacy

over the course of the 19th century occurred at just the

moment that, according to Jonathan Crary’s Techniques

of the Observer (1990), visuality was itself in a process of

transformation. Indeed, the new relationship of text to

audience bears more than a passing analogy with the

new relationship between object of vision and observer

that, according to Crary, arose in the first half of the

19th century. Crary argues that both the late 19th- and

early 20th-century avant-garde movements, and the

‘realism’ of popular visual culture found in early

photography and cinema, were ‘overlapping

components of a single social surface on which the

modernization of vision had begun decades earlier …

Modernist painting in the 1870s and 1880s and the

development of photography after 1839 can be seen as

later symptoms or consequences’ of an earlier shift,

‘well under way by 1820’. This shift is signalled, writes

Crary, ‘by the passage from the geometrical optics of

the 17th and 18th centuries to physiological optics,

which dominated both scientific and philosophical

discussion of vision in the 19th century’ (Crary 1990: 5,

16). Where the enlightenment model of vision, founded

upon the camera obscura, understood the eye as a

transparent medium and the mind as a passive receptacle of

light, the 19th century discovered the eye to be a

constructive mechanism, and the brain and nervous system

to be active contributors to visual experience.

At first glance, the modernization of vision appears far

removed from the modernization of print, but their

connection can be discovered if we trace the fortunes of

physiology beyond 1840, the moment at which Crary

considers the new paradigm of physiological optics to

have been completed. Having mapped out the nervous

routes of sensation, physiologists from mid-century

onwards became increasingly concerned with the

physiology of the brain. At first the nervous system was

regarded as a mediator between brain and body, with

the nerves passing messages between the two and so

allowing the mind, situated in the brain, to oversee and

control the body. By the late 1850s, however,

physiology began to encroach upon psychology, as

explanations of human action increasingly bypassed the

will and looked to physical causes instead. At the same

time, the conceptual basis of 19th-century psychology

began to incorporate the physiological analyses of sense

organs and sensory processes that had been produced

between the 1820s and the 1840s.7 This synthesis of the

sciences of body and mind reached an inevitable

culmination (and crisis point) in the 1870s, when such

scientific luminaries as Thomas Huxley and W. K.

Clifford declared (somewhat scandalously) that human

beings were no more than ‘automata’ (Huxley 1970: I:

241; Clifford 1886: 9).

This new materialist conception of human thought and

action set the scenes for an important but as yet little-

recognized development. It was not simply physiology

and psychology that – at least for a time – came

together. Logic, then regarded as the study of the ‘laws

of human thought’ inevitably found its place within this

new materialist study of the mind, and it should come

as no surprise that it was the new system of Boolean

logic, which had been constructed from the start as a

mechanical system of thought, that found most favour

in the eyes of materialist scientists and logicians such as

W. S. Jevons and John Venn (Jevons 1864, 1884; Venn

1894). Where the older Aristolean predicate logic was a

logic of words and things, Boolean logic is inherently a

database logic. It is a logic that divides the world into

categories and sets, and proceeds to analyse that world

along the lines of logical operatives. Boolean logic is the

logic of computers, and from the late 19th century

onwards, it was increasingly recognized as the proper

logic of information organization and analysis.8

In so describing the development of mechanical models

of reasoning we identify the precise moment in which

the physical study of the body of man merged with the

mechanical study of the laws of human thought. This is

64 S. Cook

the point at which materialist science encountered the

human mind, and consequently the point when the

machine became a representative form of the whole

human being. And this is also the moment when the

camera obscura model was definitively eclipsed, for

now thought as well as vision became a product of the

logical circuits of the body, forged by the conditioned

and unconditioned reflex connections of the human

nervous system. The meeting of psycho-physiology with

logic was inherently unstable, for while the one

described the generic human brain, the other set for

itself the task of identifying the ideal type of human

cerebral activity. Yet if the connections between these

new disciplines did not survive long into the 20th

century, nevertheless the legacy of this meeting was to

be of epoch-making importance; for the attempt to

construct material models of human thought, initially a

physiological project, would ultimately give rise to the

mechanical computer. More significantly, at least in

terms of the goals of this paper, the mechanical model

of the mind provided a model for the organization of

sensory data, not only as mediated by the eye, but also

as mediated by external forms of representation.

If the physiological study of the eye provides a context

in which to understand the new visual media of the late

19th and early 20th century, then the psycho-

physiological and logical study of the brain and mind

provides the context in which to understand new media

in general. This late 19th-century mechanization of the

human mind follows from the earlier mechanization of

the human eye, but it does not in itself constitute a

discrete chapter in the history of vision. It does,

however, allow us to understand better the convergence

of visual and print media in this period, as we can now

see the outlines of a shared database form. Crary’s

history of vision demonstrates that the new

physiological optics understood visual experience to be

as much a product of the human mind as of the human

eye; although he does not pursue the significance of

mechanical models of the brain in either Techniques of

the Observer (1990) or his later Suspensions of Perception

(1999), which although focusing upon the mind, deals

only with its subjective nature. In bringing the physical

organ of thought into the picture we can better

appreciate the extent to which physiological optics is

not only a mechanical optics, but also a database optics;

for the visual experience is now understood as

produced by a mechanism of sight acted upon by a

mechanism of thought, and the latter acts to navigate,

select and classify the inputs of the former.

This same point can be made by approaching the issue

from the point of view of the subject of modern

experience. In Suspensions of Perception, Crary examines

the change in subjectivity that, in the last part of the

19th century, arose in the wake of the earlier shift from

geometrical to physiological optics, a change that he

identifies with the emergence of ‘attention’ as the

dominant category of visual experience. Modern

visuality, in this account, becomes associated with the

ability to attend to what our eyes show us such that at

any one moment a large part of the potential picture is

filtered out. In the scientific and materialist world of

late Victorian moral science, attention became a vitally

important notion, for as the brain and nervous system

became identified with mechanism, so attention became

the last vestige of a distinctly human, as opposed to

mechanical, agency. Yet while attention could, in the

hands of a philosopher like Bergson, be expanded into

an entire intuitive and anti-mechanistic philosophy, it

could also become the very means through which the

human body could be trained to operate like a

machine. As Crary’s book illustrates, this new centrality

of mental attention in scientific attitudes towards visual

experience might have derived initially from the revolution

in optics, but it also derived considerable impetus from a

world increasingly saturated with mechanization and

mobility. Whether driving an automobile, minding a

factory production line or, as in the case of Cezanne,

observing some trees by a river with a consciously mobile

eye, Crary points out how attention becomes the necessary

ground of visual experience.

It can be argued, however, that the emerging subject of

the new visual experience outlined by Crary in his

Suspensions of Perception is at once also the subject of

the new visual literacy. Attention as the mental category

of modernity applies to much more than the

apperception of visual information; it is the dominant

mode by which the modern subject engages with

information of any form. The proper mode of

experiencing music was, by the late 19th century,

considered to be one of attending to the sounds by

means of screening out all other sensual stimuli. It is by

training the mind and body to work as attentive

machines that 19th-century students engaged with their

studies (Warwick 1998). And it is by paying close

attention to the printed word that the modern reader

engages with textual information. Attention is the

dominant category of modern experience, and this is a

form of experience in which the traditional distinction

between literacy and vision is increasingly blurred.

Late Victorian new media 65

Both modern visuality and modern literacy find their

common ground in an organized visual medium, the

mutual construct of eye and brain. The shared form of

visuality and literacy that emerged in the latter 19th

century was thus the database form. Database visuality

was not in itself a result of a second revolution in 19th-

century visuality, but rather the implicit product of the

transformation that had occurred in the first part of the

century. Nevertheless, it was only in the late 19th

century that database visuality emerged clearly in its

own right as a visual medium, allowing the aided eye to

see far more than the point of view presented to the

unaided eye. Database vision, now a commonplace of

our engagement with computer screens, was

fundamentally the product of the late Victorian archive,

and crucially associated with the development of the

social sciences in this period.

THE BODY AND ARCHIVAL VISION

Having identified the database as both the

organizational frame of the late 19th-century printed

book and, in addition, as appearing in the visual images

contained within the pages of certain of these books,

and having further discerned the relationship of the late

19th-century visual form to the body, it is now possible

to turn towards these visual forms themselves. Two

poles have been identified in late 19th-century

approaches to the visual archive, and it is now possible

to show the relationship of one of these poles to the

psycho-physiological researches of the same period. In

this particular archival strategy we find a far more likely

candidate for the antecedents of today’s database media

than the cinema.

In ‘The Body and the Archive’, Allan Sekula investigates

the emergence of the criminal archive over the course

of the 19th century, and the consequent invention not

only of the ‘criminal body’ but also the more extensive

‘social body’. Sekula is concerned with photographs of

social types, particularly although not exclusively the

criminal type: he sees a 19th-century project of social

control that gives rise to ‘a generalized, inclusive

archive … that encompasses an entire social terrain

while positioning individuals within that terrain’

(Sekula 1989: 347). The very creation of a visual field in

which the eye can see, not simply a photograph of a

particular face, but rather the relationship of this face to

all other faces, constitutes a significant moment in the

history of vision, that is, the appearance of a database

vision. In examining the institution of the photographic

archive, Sekula, like Richards, points to the problem of

FIGURE 1. Composite photographs of families, sent toGalton for his research into family likenesses, c.1884.Galton Papers 158/2. Reproduced courtesy of LibraryServices, University College London.

66 S. Cook

‘the sheer quantity of images’, and he identifies two

archival strategies: transforming the mass of images into

a representative type, and filing each individual image

within the whole archive according to some schema of

classification. Sekula labels these the ‘realist’ and

‘nominalist’ approaches, and associates the first with

the French police official Alphonse Bertillon and second

with the English eugenicist, Francis Galton.

Bertillon’s criminal archive consisted of a classification

scheme that yoked together ‘anthropometrics, the

optical precision of the camera, a refined physiognomic

vocabulary, and statistics’. He classified individuals

according to 11 bodily measurements, recorded as a

numerical series, a shorthand verbal description of

distinguishing marks and a pair of photographic

portraits. Each such classification comprised a single

card, and a total of some 120 000 such cards was

arranged according to a series of successive subdivisions

of the numerical measurements (Sekula 1989: 358).

Galton’s composite photographs, by contrast, were

exercises in the visual presentation of a single

composite statistical record. Galton’s technique,

developed in the late 1870s, involved the successive

registration and exposure of photographic portraits on

to a single plate. Turning his camera lens towards

various ‘human types’ – criminals, prostitutes, Jews,

army officers, and so on, Galton built up a visual

representation of a statistical average. Successive

exposures gradually gave rise to a photographic image

of the representative criminal (or prostitute, or even

army officer or respectable student). Paraphrasing

Galton himself, Alexander Bain wrote in the pages of

the philosophical journal Mind that such pictures were

much more than averages; they are rather the

equivalents of those large statistical tables

whose totals, divided by the number of classes

and entered on the bottom line, are the

averages. They are real generalizations, because

they include the whole of the material under

consideration. (Bain 1879: 551)

In the contrast between Bertillon’s nominalism and

Galton’s realism, Sekula identifies a crucial divergence

between types of late Victorian archival, and indeed, we

might add, contemporary database, forms. As Sekula

puts it, the ‘projects of Bertillon and Galton constitute

two methodological poles of the positivist attempt to

define and regulate social deviance’ (Sekula 1989: 353).

Galton’s composite photographs can be seen, notes

Sekula,

as the collapsed version of the archive. In this

blurred configuration, the archive attempts to

exist as a potent single image, and the single

image attempts to achieve the authority of the

archive, of the general, abstract, proposition

… Bertillon sought to embed the photograph

in the archive. Galton sought to embed the

FIGURE 2. Compositephotographs of female faces, withand without phthisis, Sir FrancisGalton, c.1884. Galton Papers158/2P (20). Reproduced courtesyof Library Services, UniversityCollege London.

Late Victorian new media 67

archive in the photograph. (Sekula 1989:

372–373)

In light of the earlier discussion of the emergence of

database vision in the late 19th century, this divergence

of database form can be related to two distinct

physiological approaches to the archive.

Where Bertillon’s strategy mirrors an older conception

of the relationship between eye and brain as distinct

organs, Galton’s strategy mirrors an emerging

conception of the eye as inseparably connected to brain.

For Bertillon the filing cabinet, the organizational

‘brain’ of the criminal archive, stands behind the

individual visual image, but for Galton the two have

merged into a single medium. It is thus no coincidence

that Galton compared his archival method with the

work of mental abstraction performed by the mind:

‘The ideal faces obtained by the method of composite

portraiture appear to have a great deal in common with

… so-called abstract ideas’ (Galton 1978 [1883]: 183).

Thus, just as Dziga Vertov would later pronounce the

‘mechanical eye’ as superior to the unaided human eye,

Galton would announce that the human mind was ‘a

most imperfect apparatus for the elaboration of general

ideas’ when compared to his ‘pictorial statistics’

(Galton 1879: 169). Contrary to Sekula’s interpretation,

such statements are not evidence of Galton’s ‘other

psychological and philosophical ambitions’ (Sekula

1989: 370); rather they are part and parcel of a single

conception of the archive as a fusion of eye and brain.

The interpretation of the emerging Victorian

photographic archive is difficult, precisely because it

occurs over a time period in which attitudes towards

the visual archive are itself in a moment of flux. There

are two distinct moments identified in Sekula’s critical

history of photography in the 19th century. First of all,

a ‘physiognomic code of visual interpretation of the

body’s signs – specifically the signs of the head – and a

technique of mechanized visual representation

intersected in the 1840s’. But from this apparent

moment of ‘optical realism’, at least with regard to

police photography, a ‘truth-apparatus’ emerges, and

the ‘central artefact of this system is not the camera but

the filing cabinet’. It is clear from Sekula’s account,

however, that this archival apparatus did not emerge

until around the 1860s, and that ‘the institution of the

photographic archive received its most thorough

articulation’ only in the 1880s and 1890s (Sekula 1989:

351–352). Sekula passes over the full significance of

Galton’s technique partly because he, quite naturally,

FIGURES 3 and 4. Alfred Marshall’s early hand-drawn diagrams from the early 1870s (from the archives of the Marshall library). At this time Marshall wasusing such curves as ‘an engine’ of his economic research. Reproduced by kind permission of the Faculty of Economics and Politics, University ofCambridge.

68 S. Cook

takes what he calls the ‘single hermeneutic paradigm’

that had emerged by mid-century as applicable also to

the later, archival, moment. ‘This paradigm’, he writes,

‘had two tightly entwined branches, physiognomy and

phrenology. Both shared the belief that the surface of

the body, and especially the face and head, bore the

outward signs of inner character’ (Sekula 1989: 347).

But although this paradigm remained in force in terms

of the objects of Galton’s representation, it is

misleading if applied to the formation of the archive

itself. For while the interpretation of the bodies

represented by the archive remained on the level of

physiognomy, the structure of the archival

representation itself reflected a shift of interest from

physiognomy to physiology. In other words, the

composite photographic portrait can be understood as

a database representation in which both the objects of

vision and the mental organization of such a

representation appear within a single frame.

A similar contrast of database strategies can be

identified in the comparison between Dziga Vertov’s

Man with a Movie Camera of 1929, and the supply and

demand diagrams that are today to be found within the

pages of any economic textbook, and which were first

drawn by the Cambridge political economist Alfred

Marshall in the early 1870s. If we take note of Jonathan

Beller’s interpretation of Vertov’s movie as a ‘political

economy of the visual’, then the comparison of these

two visual forms is particularly appropriate; but they

are here juxtaposed because, in contrast to the

photographic archives discussed by Sekula, in both

cases what is represented is essentially dynamic. In

Beller’s words Vertov’s movie (stills from which serve

to provide a ‘visual index’ to Manovich’s The Language

of New Media, 2001), is a ‘collective creation of an

image of society’, which ‘is not accomplished all at once

but is painstakingly built by passing through different

moments of the socius’ (Beller 1999: 156). In other

words, Vertov represents society by an organization of

film shots, passed through the movie projector one at a

time. Now consider the supply and demand diagram

which represents a market for some commodity and

contains within a standard coordinate space two curves,

one representing supply for the commodity, the other

representing demand. Crucially, what is represented on

the horizontal axis is quantity traded per period of

time; and so what is represented at the ‘equilibrium’

point of intersection of the two curves is not a stock,

but a flow (i.e. not an absolute quantity, but a quantity

per period of time). Furthermore, such a diagram

projects into one image the space of all possible market

combinations. As Marshall said of what he called

‘historical curves’, in which the actual state of a market

over a period is recorded, such diagrams allow the eye

to take in a whole series of facts ‘at one glance’ (Pigou

1925: 176).

Like the archival projects of Bertillon and Galton, the

visual media of Marshall and Vertov are both

fundamentally database media. In terms of a history of

visuality, their significance lies in the fact that they

allow a single pair of human eyes to see a multiplicity

of view points, as it were, ‘at one glance’. But in terms

of their different approaches to the relationship of

archive and image, we see again the two different

strategies of separation and merging. In the one, the

apparatus is separate from the images, and is used to

navigate through them. In the other, the database in its

entirety is embedded into the image.

In these two poles of the visual archive we find a far

firmer historical foundation for new media than is to be

had by looking solely to the cinema. The cinema, it is

now clear, constitutes the mechanization of but one of

these two strategies. Because of the enormous cultural

significance of the cinema in the 20th century, there has

been a widespread tendency to regard all earlier visual

technologies as but precursors to it, and consequently

to dismiss such archival strategies as those of Galton

and Marshall as either dead ends of old scientific

research, or scientific forms unrelated to the wider

culture. What I want to suggest here is that we should

recognize in precisely these hitherto overlooked visual

technologies the basic forms which, after nearly a

FIGURE 5. The Diagrams as they appeared two decades later inpublished form in Marshall’s Principles of Economics (1890). Note that alldiagrams in the Principles were relegated to footnotes, an indication ofthe uncertainty at this time of the proper place of visual media in asupposedly ‘literary’ work such as this. Alfred Marshall, Principles ofEconomics, 1961, Macmillan, reproduced with permission of PalgraveMacmillan.

Late Victorian new media 69

century on the shelves, can once more attract our

attention as the digital computer gives rise to what we

today call ‘new’ media. That is not to say that all digital

database media can be treated as mechanized versions

of the database image as constructed by Galton and

Marshall. Rather, and as Sekula describes for the late

19th century, in our own day we can identify a

spectrum of database strategies in which more, or all, or

less, or even none of the database appears within the

visual media. New media, as database media, can be

classified according to a spectrum between these two

poles, and the visual navigation strategies embedded

into contemporary computer applications, such as site

maps, scrolling pages, desktop icons, and so forth,

should serve to remind us that it is not the cinema and

the moving image that provides the most appropriate

antecedent of the new media of today.

CONCLUSION: BETWEEN BOOK AND CINEMA

The 19th-century book was bursting at the seams,

containing within its pages more and more visual forms

of information organization and analysis. This late

19th-century transformation of the printed document

in the interests of the sciences opened the gates for a

host of new technologies of visual information

organization and analysis. This revolution has as yet

hardly been recognized for what it was, and indeed it

would seem plausible that the recognition of the

significance of this early revolution in information

technology could only occur once our own

consciousnesses had become acquainted and

familiarized with what today we call new media. From

the vantage point of the mid-20th century, the

development of such Victorian visual technologies as

the praxinoscope, the zootrope, the composite picture,

and the supply and demand diagram were either

ignored or viewed as precursors to the cinema. Perhaps

inevitably, they were not seen as technologies significant

in their own right, and certainly not as antecedents of

any other form of media. It is only today, as new media

presents us with a whole range of visual presentations,

of which the conventional moving image is but one,

that we are in a position to revise such an

interpretation. Now we can appreciate that the cinema

was but one of many possible developments from the

19th-century visual archive; a development which, for

most of the 20th century, eclipsed all others, but a

development which today can be appreciated as just

one element within the whole spectrum of

contemporary new media.

NOTES

[1] If, in the early Soviet film-maker Dziga Vertov,

Manovich has found ‘a major ‘‘database filmmaker’’ of

the 20th century’ (Manovich 2001: xxiv), then it is

worthwhile noting that Vertov’s approach to cinema

was fundamentally that of a Leninist social scientist who

regarded his camera as an epistemological instrument

capable of rendering visible aspects of the social fabric

invisible to the naked eye (on Vertov’s scientism see

Michelson 1992).

[2] For an early but thorough discussion of this issue see

Howes 1895. I would like to thank Rachel Stroumsa for

this point.

[3] I have been unable to find any scholarly studies

concerning the history of the form of the printed book

in the 19th century. The information in the main text

has been culled from various articles contained in the

journal for professional indexers – The Indexer.

[4] On the history of graphs in this period see Hankins

1999.

[5] Some of the classic texts in this debate are E. Havelock,

The Literate Revolution in Greece and Its Cultural

Consequences, Princeton, Princeton University Press,

1982; M. McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making

of Typographic Man, Toronto, Toronto University Press,

1962; W. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing

of the Word, London and New York, Methuen, 1982;

E. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change:

Communication and Cultural Transformations in Early-

Modern Europe, Cambridge and New York, Cambridge

University Press, 1980 (which is highly critical of

McLuhan); and R. Pattison, On Literacy: The Politics of

the Word from Homer to the Age of Rock, Oxford and

New York, Oxford University Press, 1982 (which argues

against Havelock, Ong and McLuhan).

[6] It was only in the 19th century that books changed their

function from – in Graham’s words – ‘vehicles by which

writers might speak to absent audiences’ to ‘silent

repositories of information’ (Graham 1993 [1987]: 18).

Graham charts his way through this long literacy debate

in order to draw an upper limit to his historical

treatment of written and spoken religious scripture, and

from this point of view post-Victorian religious

sensibility has arrived at a moment of crisis because a

visual relationship of subjectivity to text has replaced

the traditional oral–written culture of the word. Modern

Western literacy, in other words, has since the 19th

century become a visual literacy; and visual literacy

entails a rupture in the traditional immediacy of the

word. The advent of a purely visual literacy necessitates,

70 S. Cook

then, a new kind of textual mediation between the

subject and the object of text.

[7] For a useful summary of this development of

physiological research into the second part of the 19th

century see White 1994.

[8] The term ‘information’ is indeed appropriate here, for

following the reduction of mathematics to logic by

Russell and Whitehead at the turn of the century, the

principles of logic were understood as grounding not

simply the meaning of written and spoken words, but

rather the meaning of any symbolic language at all. The

convergence of word and image perhaps finds its apogee

in the picture theory of meaning set out in

Wittgenstein’s Tractatus of 1921.

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