Tracing social connections in the Victorian Jewish Writers Project

In March 2022, we launched the Victorian Jewish Writers Project (VJWP), a digital collection of texts written by nineteenth-century British Jews accompanied by short articles on significant authors, places, and events of the Anglo-Jewish world. When we began building the collection in 2021, our conceptual framework was clear: Victorian Jewry is underrepresented both in Jewish Studies and Victorian Studies, so we would create a resource to supply primary texts and some analytical information to anyone interested. Despite our familiarity with archive theory, we considered our role in the project as little more than what Latour calls intermediaries, or “mere informants.” Yet, the process of digitizing and publicizing a canon, particularly a canon tied to a cultural heritage, is an inherently social act, and in this article we will explore the modes of social engagement inherent in creating and maintaining digital archives. In particular, we make use of Latour’s actor-network theory to understand the relationships forged by archives in digital spaces.