The City and its Periodicals

Jean’s question about the institute’s purpose has given me a lot to think about. The reading list is hefty and yet far from comprehensive. How could we possible cover the city’s entire periodical history, with all of its innumerable voices we’ll undoubtedly fail to hear and account for? Perhaps the herculean effort it would take to fully grasp the city and its periodicals underscores Scholes and Latham’s call for more collaboration.I can’t speak on behalf of the institute’s goals, but I’ve had the privilege of assisting Mark and seeing how the project has developed thus far. A few weeks ago, we were finalizing one of the walking tours, and along the way, we stumbled upon the old Tammany Hall building, a space now shrouded in anonymity, as patrons came and went from the café that now occupies the ground floor. While standing at that street corner, Mark pressed me with the question, “who cares if people no longer know the building’s place in history? What gets lost?”Our interdisciplinary approaches have enabled us to imagine print communities. Recent methods to investigate a periodical’s public engagement may focus on political content and debates as well as materiality and business practices or what scholars have called “periodical codes.” What about the surrounding communities—not the imagined, but physical ones? I suppose I see the periodical and its place of publication as merged in symbiotic relationship, mutually influencing one another. I have no doubt we could easily recover how a little magazine was embedded in the counter-cultural activities of the Village in the 1920s, both creating and created by the local community. Each of our four walking tours, I imagine, will have local “neighborhood” networks. But I also imagine we’ll find some surprising associations—connections across time, different city spaces, and socio-political circles.Situating periodicals in their respective place adds yet another dimension to our already burdensome task of attempting to comprehend these complex forms that often demand an interdisciplinary mind with an eye for a wide range of connections.I tend to think of this institute as a cultural history of NYC as told through the disparate voices of the periodical press, but at the same time, perhaps it will allow us a space to share methods and fuse our knowledge into new mapping tools that may help us conceptualize and situate these print artifacts within a larger context. Perhaps the map will end up becoming a public resource akin to Wikipedia—a reference tool, starting point, and visual means that opens our eyes to connections we might have overlooked. Like I said, I can’t speak to the institute’s express aims, but maybe that’s for all of us to determine once we’ve pooled our expertise and mulled over this city and its periodicals.