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

报纸是第一个面向大众的大数据。它们在19世纪的急剧扩张创造了一种信息丰富、传播迅速的全球文化。然而，在当时的学术研究中，报纸的重要性在很大程度上是用大都会和国家的术语来定义的。地方机构的收集和数字化进一步将报纸置于全国范围内。“海洋交流：追溯历史报纸资料库中的全球信息网络，1840-1914”（OcEx）汇集了美国、墨西哥、德国、荷兰、芬兰和英国在计算期刊研究方面的领先成果，通过连接目前孤立在国家馆藏中的数字化报纸语料库，研究19世纪报纸中跨越国家和语言界限的信息流模式。通过将来自不同国家和学科的历史报纸专家聚集在一起，围绕共同的问题，OcEx寻求突破概念、制度和政治上的障碍，这些障碍限制了对大人文数据的研究；通过计算分析，积极跨越以前分隔数字化报纸语料库的国界；并以典型的国家数字文化遗产组织所隐藏的方式说明了19世纪报纸的全球联系。我们建议协调这个六国小组的努力：为相关报纸段落的文本和视觉相似性建立分类器；创建一个由19世纪出现的不同体裁、形式和文本元素组成的网络本体；模拟和可视化文本迁移和病毒文化；对跨地区、国家和语言边界的文本概念迁移和翻译进行建模和可视化；分析结果的敏感性和通用性；发布公共集合。对于19世纪期刊和思想史的学者来说，OcEx揭示了国际通过当地的新闻，建议，小插曲，通俗科学，诗歌，小说等方式折射的方式。通过揭示文本和概念传播的全球网络，OcEx为世界各地的读者如何通过报纸相互感知创造了大量的新证据。这些见解可能会重塑那些支撑比较文学、翻译研究、跨国和思想史等领域学者研究的假设。计算语言学提供了构建块（识别翻译、释义、文本重用），可以使具有历史和当代意义的学术研究成为可能。同时，这些方法对其结果的有效性和可靠性提出了根本性的问题（如与ocr相关的噪声的影响，或语料库的不完全可比性）。最后，通过将大型数字报纸收藏的研究联系起来，OcEx将为国家图书馆和其他为数字学术提供大规模数据的数据托管机构提供一个模型。该项目将测试新兴和成熟的报纸数字化工作的可访问性和互操作性，并为未来的发展提供明确的建议。

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.