Defining Compressive Aesthetics takes the idea of compression, often assumed to be a twentieth-century century critical concept, as a framework for identifying overlooked connections between pre-electronic histories of digital media and the vastly expanded print cultures of the nineteenth century. We believe that new models for interpretation and critical understanding might emerge by bringing closer together histories of print and of digital technologies, and by investigating links between literary and digital history in new ways. This two-day, interdisciplinary workshop will assemble a small group of scholars in nineteenth-century print cultures (literary and visual) and digital studies, to pursue questions relating to the emergence of compressive aesthetics in early nineteenth-century cheap print, and consider its persistence across time and place. The workshop is part of a larger, on-going international project on compressive aesthetics that seeks to understand print and digital as vitally connected media environments, and to consider the implications of this as we negotiate questions of estrangement in the face of contemporary new media.