1. See the section “Book Terminology and Citation Strategy” for details about how we use the terms “witness,” “edition,” and “cluster” to discuss different aspects of nineteenth-century newspaper reprinting and computational analyses of text duplication.

2. Our project and this book have focused primarily on newspapers in the United States. We do include historical newspaper data from other countries, such as the UK and Australia, in our reprint detection pipeline in order to ascertain the international reach of texts. However, our US data is much broader and richer overall, and our team’s primary humanistic expertise is also in the history and literature of the United States. So wWile similar systems of newspaper exchange can be found in other countries in this period and we will occasionally mention international reprinting, we will primarily make claims about US exchanges, editors, authors, and readers.

3. The past decade in particular has vastly expanded the purview of print culture studies to include a range of items—the vast majority of objects produced by print, in fact—rarely analyzed in earlier work that focused more squarely on the book and near-neighbor media, such as political pamphlets or broadsides. Among the most important investigations of so-called ephemera are Lisa Gitelman’s “Print Culture (Other Than Codex): Job Printing and Its Importance” in N. Katherine Hayles and Jessica Pressman, eds., Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the Humanities in the Postprint Era, 1 edition (Minneapolis ; London: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2013), Gitelman’s chapter on forms in Lisa Gitelman, Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (Duke University Press Books, 2014), and Matthew P. Brown’s analysis of blanks in Matthew P. Brown, “Blanks: Data, Method, and the British American Print Shop,” American Literary History 29, no. 2 (May 24, 2017): 228–47, https://muse-jhu-edu.ezproxy.neu.edu/article/659831.

4. For more on scrapbooking as a creative and political act in the nineteenth century, see Ellen Gruber Garvey, Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance (Oxford University Press, 2012), while Claudia Stokes, “Novel Commonplaces: Quotation, Epigraphs, and Literary Authority,” American Literary History 30, no. 2 (April 1, 2018): 201–21, doi:10.1093/alh/ajy005. demonstrates the importance of common-placing well into the middle of the same period.

5. Much current work on reprinting traces back to Meredith L. McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). Subsequent investigations include Leslee Thorne-Murphy, “Re-Authorship: Authoring, Editing, and Coauthoring the Transatlantic Publications of Charlotte M. Yonge’s Aunt Charlotte’s Stories of Bible History,” Book History 13, no. 1 (2010): 80–103, doi:10.1353/bh.2010.0015, M. H. Beals, “Close Readings of Big Data: Triangulating Patterns of Textual Reappearance and Attribution in the Caledonian Mercury, 182040,” Victorian Periodicals Review 51, no. 4 (2018): 616–39, http://muse.jhu.edu/article/714426, Katie Mcgettigan, “Transatlantic Reprinting as National Performance: Staging America in London Magazines, 18391852,” Journal of American Studies, 2019, 1–32, doi:10.1017/S0021875818001317, Adam Gordon, “Beyond the ‘Proper Notice’: Frederick Douglass, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and the Politics of Critical Reprinting,” American Literature 91, no. 1 (March 1, 2019): 1–29, doi:10.1215/00029831-7335325, Avery Blankenship, “Twain in Circulation: Early Twain and the Culture of Reprinting,” The Mark Twain Annual 19, no. 1 (2021): 68–94, doi:10.5325/marktwaij.19.1.0068, Todd Thompson, “Viral Jokes and Fugitive Humor in the Nineteenth-Century Culture of Reprinting,” Studies in American Humor 7, no. 1 (2021): 61–85, doi:10.5325/studamerhumor.7.1.0061. For comparative histories of UK copyright in the period, useful as comparison with the largely American milieu described in this book, see Will Slauter, “Upright Piracy: Understanding the Lack of Copyright for Journalism in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” Book History 16, no. 1 (2013): 34–61, doi:10.1353/bh.2013.0011, Elena Cooper, “Copyright in Periodicals During the Nineteenth Century: Balancing the Rights of Contributors and Publishers,” Victorian Periodicals Review 51, no. 4 (2018): 661–78, http://muse.jhu.edu/article/714428, and Will Slauter, “Copyright and the Political Economy of News in Britain, 18361911,” Victorian Periodicals Review 51, no. 4 (2018): 640–60, http://muse.jhu.edu/article/714427. McGill’s summary of copyright scholarship in Meredith L. McGill, “Copyright and Intellectual Property: The State of the Discipline,” Book History 16, no. 1 (2013): 387–427, doi:10.1353/bh.2013.0010. also provides helpful context.

6. See, for example, Whitney Anne Trettien’s account of algorithmically-generated editions of John Milton in DHQ Whitney Anne Trettien, “A Deep History of Electronic Textuality: The Case of English Reprints Jhon Milton Areopagitica,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 7, no. 1 (2013), http://digitalhumanities.org:8081/dhq/vol/7/1/000150/000150.html. or Matthew Kirschenbaum’s account of the “bibliologistics” undergirding much book production in the twenty-first century Matthew Kirschenbaum, “Bibliologistics: The Nature of Books Now, or A Memorable Fancy” (Post45, April 8, 2020), http://post45.org/2020/04/bibliologistics-the-nature-of-books-now-or-a-memorable-fancy/.

7. Katherine Bode’s investigation of Australian newspaper literature in Katherine Bode, A World of Fiction: Digital Collections and the Future of Literary History, Digital Humanities Ser (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2018), http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/j.ctvdtpj1d. is most pertinent to both our subject and methods in Going the Rounds. For more on the nineteenth-century newspaper as both a form and literary medium, see Kevin G. Barnhurst and John Nerone, The Form of News: A History (Guilford Press, 2002), http://books.google.com?id=AIvtqbVJCAAC, Karen Roggenkamp, Narrating the News: New Journalism and Literary Genre in Late Nineteenth-century American Newspapers and Fiction (Kent State University Press, 2005), David Paul Nord, Communities of Journalism: A History of American Newspapers and Their Readers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), Sari Edelstein, Between the Novel and the News : The Emergence of American Women’s Writing (University of Virginia Press, 2014), http://books.upress.virginia.edu/detail%2Fbooks%2Fgroup-4759.xml?q=, and Benjamin Fagan, The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation (University of Georgia Press, 2016), http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt189tst9.

8. Matthew Philpotts, “Dimension: Fractal Forms and Periodical Texture,” Victorian Periodicals Review 48, no. 3 (2015): 403–27, doi:10.1353/vpr.2015.0035, pg. 404.

9. Ibid., pg. 406.

10. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America: Part the Second, trans. Henry Reeve (New York, NY: J. & H. G. Langley, 1840), http://hdl.handle.net/2027/uva.x000317139, pg. 111.

11. Jo Guldi and David Armitage, The History Manifesto (Cambridge University Press, 2014).

12. Jo Guldi, “Critical Search: A Procedure for Guided Reading in Large-Scale Textual Corpora,” Journal of Cultural Analytics, 2018, doi:10.22148/16.030.

13. We might clarify that our method is largely agnostic toward questions of genre. Very short forms of quotation, such as word-level biblical exegesis, would not be identified through our methods, which rely on longer passages.

14. In a 2017 Book History article, Viral Texts PI Ryan Cordell “exhort[ed] scholars to investigate and thus better understand the composition (both technical and social) of the digitized archives they use and to integrate such source criticism into any scholarship that makes claims from the digitized archive.” Ryan Cordell, “"Q I-Jtb the Raven": Taking Dirty OCR Seriously,” Book History 20 (2017): 188–225, pg. 201. Subsequently, the Viral Texts team worked with multi-national collaborators in the Oceanic Exchanges project to, among other things, publish The Atlas of Digitised Newspapers and Metadata: Reports from Oceanic Exchanges, which includes database histories of the major newspaper corpora we employ in Viral Texts. Those histories can be found in the printed Atlas or online at https://www.digitisednewspapers.net/histories/.

15. M. H. Beals and Emily Bell, “The Atlas of Digitised Newspapers and Metadata: Reports from Oceanic Exchanges” (Loughborough, 2020), https://www.digitisednewspapers.net/.

16. Dànielle Nicole DeVoss and Jim Ridolfo, “Composing for Recomposition: Rhetorical Velocity and Delivery,” Text (13.2, January 15, 2009), http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/13.2/topoi/ridolfo_devoss/intro.html.

17. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, 2006), pg. 65.

18. Trish Loughran, The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770-1870 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), pg. 347.

19. Garvey, Writing with Scissors, 7.

20. J. Gerald Kennedy, Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture, ed. J. Gerald Kennedy and Jerome McGann, Har/Chrt (Louisiana State University Press, 2012), 7.

21. Karine Nahon and Jeff Hemsley, Going Viral, 2013, 16.

22. Asaf Nissenbaum and Limor Shifman, “Internet Memes as Contested Cultural Capital: The Case of 4chan’s /B/ Board,” New Media & Society 19, no. 4 (April 1, 2017): 483–501, doi:10.1177/1461444815609313, pg. 485.

23. Kathryn VanArendonk, “It Makes Total Sense We’re All into Sea Shanties Now” (Vulture), accessed May 17, 2021, https://www.vulture.com/2021/01/tiktok-sea-shanties-explained.html.

24. Rebecca Renner, “Everyone’s Singing Sea Shanties (or Are They Whaling Songs?),” The New York Times: Style, January 13, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/13/style/sea-shanty-tiktok-wellerman.html.

25. Lars Brandle, “Nathan Evans’ ’Wellerman’ Sailing to Another Week at No. 1 in U.K. Chart” (Billboard, March 22, 2021), https://www.billboard.com/articles/business/chart-beat/9544080/nathan-evans-wellerman-uk-chart-blast/.

26. Kate M. Miltner and Tim Highfield, “Never Gonna GIF You up: Analyzing the Cultural Significance of the Animated GIF,” Social Media + Society 3, no. 3 (July 1, 2017): 2056305117725223, doi:10.1177/2056305117725223, pg. 6.

27. The meme was first proposed by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, as a “replicator” for ideas, “a unit of cultural transmission…drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup” of “human culture.” In Dawkins’s original conception, memes describe far more than shared Internet content. Memes can be “tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches.” For Dawkins the meme is not a metaphor, but a physical reality: “Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.”, Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition (OUP Oxford, 2006), 192, http://books.google.com?id=EJeHTt8hW7UC. While memetics has been increasingly marginalized as a scientific discipline, the idea of memes—the meme meme—continues to propagate and mutate with our culture. In particular, the word “meme” has shifted from referring to a generalized idea replicator and has instead become a shorthand term for viral content online, particularly for works that have become so widely known that an ecology of variations, remixes, and responses has emerged around the original pieces. The Know Your Meme website defines the “Internet meme” as “a piece of content or an idea that’s passed from person to person, changing and evolving along the way. A piece of content that is passed from person to person, but does not evolve or change during the transmission process is considered viral content.”, Know Your Meme, “Know Your Meme” (Know Your Meme), accessed May 19, 2021, https://knowyourmeme.com/about. When discussing online content, then, the meme and virality are now entangled concepts—indeed, Dawkins’s broader theorization of the meme has been largely replaced by discussions of content sharing and virality. As a way to consider the transmission of ideas, the meme proves useful, if only because it asks us to attend not to distinct cultural artifacts—this entire poem, that entire story—but to the more amorphous concepts and rhetorical figures that underlie specific artifacts and often propagate beyond them.

28. Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (New York: NYU Press, 2013), 20, 44, 194.

29. DeVoss and Ridolfo, “Composing for Recomposition.”

30. In his autobiography, Benjamin Franklin provides one of the starkest illustrations of the historical distinction between writing and composing. Discussing the poems created by his first printing master, Samuel Keimer, Franklin writes, “He could not be said to write them, for his manner was to compose them in the types directly out of his head.”, Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Peter Conn and Nathan G. Goodman, Penn Reading Project Edition (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt3fhqhr.5, pg. 25. Franklin clearly distinguishes writing, as an art of quill and paper, from composing, an art of metal type.

31. Garvey, Writing with Scissors, 31.

32. An 1841 book of sheet music for the poem can be found in the Library of Congress’s Performing Arts Encyclopedia at http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/loc.music.sm1841.380450/default.html. Later editions of the music can also be found in the Library of Congress’s digital collections. The musical version of the poem testifies to its wide cultural impact—or, in the spirit of this book, to its virality.

33. Lincoln A Mullen, “The Making of America’s Public Bible: Computational Text Analysis for Religious History,” in Introduction to Digital Humanities: Research Methods for the Study of Religion, Preprint, 2018, 20, https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:20031/, pg. 6.

34. Jerome McGann, “From Text to Work: Digital Tools and the Emergence of the Social Text,” Romanticism on the Net, nos. 41-42 (2006), doi:10.7202/013153ar.

35. Cordell, “"Q I-Jtb the Raven"”; David A Smith and Ryan Cordell, “A Research Agenda for Historical and Multilingual Optical Character Recognition,” 2018, https://repository.library.northeastern.edu/files/neu:f1881m035.

36. Brown, “Blanks.”

37. Gabi Kirilloff, “Computation as Context: New Approaches to the Close/Distant Reading Debate,” College Literature 49, no. 1 (2022): 1–25, doi:10.1353/lit.2022.0000, pg. 2, 19.