Remediation as reading: digitising The Western Home Monthly

Abstract

This paper serves as a report from the field in the midst of the collaborative digitisation of The Western Home Monthly (1899–1932), a Winnipeg-based middlebrow magazine. It reflects on the methodological and theoretical challenges that face periodical scholars and on how those challenges are sometimes addressed and sometimes exacerbated by digitisation. Most importantly, it explores the unique reading perspective afforded by the process of digitising an archive, and asks how this process might help to develop new methodologies for reading periodicals that are more attentive to the media-specificity of the middlebrow magazine.