20180415_Beals_CloseReadingsofBigData_Article_Final.pdf (312.33 kB)
Close readings of big data: Triangulating patterns of textual reappearance and attribution in the Caledonian Mercury, 1820-1840
This essay demonstrates how the iterative use of close and distant reading with historical newspapers can provide new and complementary evidence of the role of scissors-and-paste journalism, or reprinting, in the spread of news content. Using Gale's nineteenth-century British newspaper collections, this paper suggests how best to read the evidence of duplicated content obtained through text mining and explores the extent to which this level of analysis can distinguish between different editorial or production styles. Delving into a close reading of the Caledonian Mercury between 1820 and 1840, this study then tests hypotheses about word count and publication frequency developed through distant reading and determines its most common editorial structures. The study concludes with an exploration of how to extrapolate conclusions from close readings to support a more nuanced understanding of the results of large-scale textual analyses. Overall, it argues that iterative testing through both big data and close reading methodologies, a so-called middle-scale analysis, provides a better method for understanding the ambiguous and shifting structures of nineteenth-century newspapers as well as the points of connection between them.
History
Department
- Politics and International Studies
Published in
Victorian Periodicals ReviewVolume
51Issue
4Pages
616-639Citation
BEALS, M.H., 2018. Close readings of big data: Triangulating patterns of textual reappearance and attribution in the Caledonian Mercury, 1820-1840. Victorian Periodicals Review, 51 (4), pp.616-639.Publisher
Johns Hopkins University Press © The Research Society for Victorian PeriodicalsVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Acceptance date
2018-04-15Publication date
2019-01-14Notes
This paper was published in the journal Victorian Periodicals Review and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1353/vpr.2018.0046.ISSN
0709-4698eISSN
1712-526XPublisher version
Language
- en