Oceanic Exchanges: Tracing Global Information Networks In Historical Newspaper Repositories, 1840-1914

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Newspapers were the first big data for a mass audience. Their dramatic expansion over the nineteenth century created a global culture of abundant, rapidly circulating information. The significance of the newspaper, however, has largely been defined in metropolitan and national terms in scholarship of the period. The collecting and digitization by local institutions further situated newspapers within a national context. "Oceanic Exchanges: Tracing Global Information Networks in Historical Newspaper Repositories, 1840-1914" (OcEx) brings together leading efforts in computational periodicals research from the US, Mexico, Germany, the Netherlands, Finland and the UK to examine patterns of information flow across national and linguistic boundaries in nineteenth century newspapers by linking digitized newspaper corpora currently siloed in national collections. OcEx seeks to break through the conceptual, institutional, and political barriers which have limited working with big humanities data by bringing together historical newspaper experts from different countries and disciplines around common questions; by actively crossing the national boundaries that have previously separated digitized newspaper corpora through computational analysis; and by illustrating the global connectedness of nineteenth-century newspapers in ways hidden by typical national organizations of digital cultural heritage. We propose to coordinate the efforts of this six-nation team to: build classifiers for textual and visual similarity of related newspaper passages; create a networked ontology of different genres, forms, and textual elements that emerged during the nineteenth century; model and visualise textual migration and viral culture; model and visualise conceptual migration and translation of texts across regional, national, and linguistic boundaries; analyze the sensitivity and generality of results; release public collections. For scholars of nineteenth-century periodicals and intellectual history, OcEx uncovers the ways that the international was refracted through the local as news, advice, vignettes, popular science, poetry, fiction, and more. By revealing the global networks through which texts and concepts traveled, OcEx creates an abundance of new evidence about how readers around the world perceived each other through the newspaper. These insights may reshape the assumptions that underpin research by scholars in comparative literature, translation studies, transnational and intellectual history, and beyond. Computational linguistics provides building blocks (recognizing translation, paraphrasing, text reuse) that can enable scholarly investigations, with both historical and contemporary implications. At the same time, such methods raise fundamental questions regarding the validity and reliability of their results (such as the effects of OCR-related noise, or imperfect comparability of corpora). Finally, by linking research across large-scale digital newspaper collections, OcEx will offer a model for national libraries and other data custodians that host large-scale data for digital scholarship. The project will test the accessibility and interoperability of emerging and well established newspaper digitisation efforts and output clear recommendations for structuring such development in future.