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VICTEUR: European Migrants in the British Imagination: Victorian and Neo-Victorian Culture is a 5-year project funded by an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council. The study will use big data to address a key unanswered societal question, how does migration impact on the cultural identity of both migrant and host communities in the historical long-term.

Victorian Britain was much more diverse than we assume today. It was the target destination for large numbers of migrants from across Europe fleeing war, political turmoil and economic deprivation.

Professor Gerardine Meaney

Principal Investigator

What is VICTEUR?

What can the large scale literary datasets now available tell us about the ways in which national cultures develop and the role of migration in that development?

This project seeks to push beyond the frontiers of current understanding of the role of migration and migrants in the dynamics of cultural change and continuity, examining intra-European migration in the Victorian period through the ‘macroscope’ of text mining and the microscopes of literary scholarship. During the Victorian period Britain was the target destination for large numbers of migrants from across Europe fleeing war, political turmoil and/or economic deprivation.

VICTEUR will focus on how the intra-European cultural exchange triggered by this movement of population is embedded in Victorian fiction. It will identify persistent and residual narratives and attitudes to a cross-section of European migrants by members of the host community and the cultural output of these migrants across a very large literary data set, the 35,918 volumes of fiction in the British Library Nineteenth Century Corpus operationalised for text mining via Curatr.

“As part of this study, we will apply text mining methods to study a corpus consisting of nearly 36,000 digitised books from the British Library, using the new Curatr platform, developed as part of the VICTEUR project. Based on these analyses, the project will then trace the residual impact of these cultural representations in modern neo-Victorian fiction, film, and television, by combining methodologies from data science, digital humanities, and cultural memory studies.”

Dr Derek Greene

Co-Investigator

VICTEUR in numbers

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Researchers

Creation of 10 research positions – PhD students, post-doctoral researchers, a research technologist and a research assistant – at UCD.

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Books

VICTEUR will involve text analysis of nearly 36,000 books, in the British Library Nineteenth Century Corpus, and shared by them in digital format.

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Support

 The project has been awarded a prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant of €2.5 million for a  5-year study.

Social media

Follow @Victeurproject on twitter to receive project news and updates on upcoming events.

The VICTEUR team

VICTEUR’S research team combines UCD’s strengths in cultural criticism and social network analysis, traditional humanities and new computational approaches, established and early stage researchers.

Professor Gerardine Meaney

Principal Investigator

Dr Derek Greene

Co-Investigator

Dr Karen Wade

Cultural Analytics Lecturer

Dr Maria Mulvany

Postdoctoral Fellow

Dr Briony Wickes

Postdoctoral Fellow

Dr Katie Mishler

Postdoctoral Fellow

Dr Claire Brophy

ERC Fellow, VICTEUR project

Lauren Cassidy

PhD Researcher

Iulia Molnar

PhD Researcher

Caylum O’Neill

PhD Researcher

Learn more about previous and upcoming VICTEUR events.

The next VICTEUR event is in collaboration with Centre for Culture, Data and Society and IASH, University of Edinburgh – Curatr Workshop: A new tool for analysing the British Library’s Corpus – takes place in:
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