Since their inception in the middle of the twentieth century, digital technologies developed from big machines accessed only by small groups of scientists and corporative experts, to “personal” devices providing opportunities for interaction to large masses of users. As a wide range of hardware and software interfaces were introduced, the field of human–computer interaction (HCI) tackled the pragmatic and theoretical implications of this change. This chapter takes up the toolbox developed in this context to ask new kinds of questions about the history of automata in the nineteenth century. As automata were offered to public spectacle and, to some extent, consumption, commentators discussed the reactions of “users” and observers of these devices, creating a body of theoretical reflections that can be read as HCI ante litteram. By considering cultural texts and artifacts that contributed to debates about “human–automata interactions,” the chapter mobilizes later debates in HCI and artificial intelligence to reconsider the ways in which Victorians discussed and imagined how people react to automata exhibiting the appearance of intelligent behavior.

This chapter models the use of digital humanities methodologies to study semantic history. Corpus analysis and geographical information systems techniques are applied to trace the use of the word ‘sublime’ in a large collection of digitized literary works from the final decade of the nineteenth century. This collection, which comprises nearly 10,000 texts from the 1890s, was extracted from the British Library’s Nineteenth-Century Books Corpus. The chapter explains the steps involved in extracting and analyzing this portion of the corpus. It then presents a case study focused on the contexts, meanings, and locations associated with the word ’sublime’ in literary works from the 1890s. This case study tests a hypothesis derived by consulting the Oxford English Dictionary, which suggests that by the end of the nineteenth century, ‘sublime’ was often used unsystematically as an intensifier, as a word for labeling any experience or phenomena that defied description.

The idea of the “oceanic” sits uneasily within the frame of nineteenth-century American literature. The categories “nineteenth-century,” “American,” and “literature” only partially account for the fluid and plural cultures of the ocean. A considerable part of the energy of the emerging field of oceanic studies comes from the ways in which it challenges traditional generic boundaries, historical eras, and conceptions of literature. A challenge in putting together a chapter about oceanic literature in nineteenth-century America – a task that is, fundamentally, about identifying a cogent and manageable archive – lies in dealing with the tensions that this energy generates. While it would be relatively simple to chronicle written texts about the sea by American authors, doing so would fail to tell the whole story about oceanic literature in the USA at this period of time. Conversely, if a limitation of this sort is not applied, the category of oceanic literature becomes so bloated as to become unmanageable and pointless. But a problem of this sort is ultimately a catalyzing one, for it foregrounds questions of definition that are significant when creating a primary body of texts of any sort. Accordingly, in what follows, the aim will be to build up gradually, from solid foundations – texts that are unproblematically American, oceanic, and, well, texts – into gradually more speculative terrains, where such designations might not hold. Along the way, the chapter will also allude to some of the theoretical issues that have structured the field for those who wish to explore them further as well as some of the sociopolitical and historical contexts that framed the life of the ocean in the era.