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Between 1783 and 1840, the number of newspapers published in Scotland grew tenfold and spread far beyond the key port towns of Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Aberdeen into market towns and centres throughout the region. Although these provincial newspapers remained weekly or bi-weekly publications throughout the period, they still required a significant amount of international reportage to fill their four to eight pages. This material was shamelessly, and often haphazardly, gleaned from international periodicals in the form of scissors-and-paste reprints. Through these half-hearted shortcuts, we can develop a significant understanding of newspaper networks before the rise of international telegraphy and the slow decline of the scissors-and-paste system. Utilising highly detailed transcriptions of newspaper content from Scotland, England and the wider Anglophone world, this paper will trace key dissemination pathways of news content from its origin in various British colonies and the United States, through its many reprints, abridgments, summaries and commentaries, to the pages of Scottish periodical press. By mapping the shape and directionality of these network connections, a greater understanding of news dissemination and editorial links can be achieved. These networks can then form the statistical basis of further qualitative studies into the spread of ideas or interpersonal connections. The paper, developed and expanded from an initial proposal presented at ESSHC 2014, will demonstrate how, through a combination of traditional close reading, ‘big data’ edition tracking, and social network analysis, Georgian news networks, including periodicals with extremely short runs and no contextual records, can be significantly mapped and the quantitative influence of key hubs can be preliminarily determined. It will explore the relative value of manual and computer-assisted transcriptions at different stages of the project, the feasibility of training historians in high-level programming languages such as Python, the nature of the resulting network data and its interoperability with mathematical and sociology research, and the possibilities for wider dissemination and collective reuse of transcription data. Finally, the piece will demonstrate, through select case studies, how basic quantitative data regarding network dissemination pathways can fundamentally alter our interpretation of the purpose of miscellany material in Scotland’s provincial press.
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Hunt or Gather, Share or Steal:Scottish News Networks, 1790-1840
M. H. BealsSheffield Hallam University
@mhbeals
View These Slides
About MeColonial News Database
View This Presentation
After 16 Sept 2014
+Overview
Scottish Scissors-and-Paste Journalism
Identifying Reprints
Understanding Dissemination Pathways
Manual Construction of Social Networks
Digitally Constructed Dissemination Pathways
+Journalism in Georgian Scotland
Proliferation of Colonial and Provincial PressesSpread of Journeyman Printers
Reduction of Stamp Duty
New Profit ModelsEntertaining and Literary Content
Adverts to Attract Readers to Sell to Advertisers
Ports and Post-RoadsSignificant amount of Material Copied from London
Growth of Domestic News-SharingEventual Establishment of Direct Overseas Connections
Manual Dissemination of NewsLimited Number of “Specials”
Postal Exchange, Subscriptions, CorrespondenceNo Telegraph until 1840s and Not Used for Miscellany
+Scissors-and-Paste Journalism
A contemporary term, often used pejoratively, for the wide-spread practice of excerpting from or recycling of articles from other publications, this term actually covered a number of different editorial strategies, ranging from agreed syndication to unacknowledged piracy […] The practice was not limited to news and, encouraged by confused and ambiguous copyright law, many cheap literary miscellanies were founded on the premise of extracting 'useful knowledge' from prohibitively expensive books, monthlies and quarterlies to make it more accessible to the lower classes.
Catherine Feely, Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism
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Promise Large-Scale Digitisation EffortsKeyword SearchingnGram Matching (WCopyFind)Edition Tracking (Juxta)
Viral Texts Project (Cordell, Dillon, and Smith) Large-Scale Corpus of Nineteenth Century Newspapers
Extensive, Automatic Repair of OCR ErrorsIdentification of Highly Reprinted Materials (Memes)
Discussion and Exploration of Meme Traits and and Patterns
PerilsDiscrete Digital Corpera (Paywalls)
Offline Penumbra (Curation)Lost Nodes (Incomplete Data)
OCR Variability (50-80%)
Computer-Aided Identification of Reprints
+ Computer-Aided Identification of Reprints
# concordanceset.pyimport redef replace_words(text, word_dic): rc = re.compile('|'.join(map(re.escape, word_dic))) def translate(match): return word_dic[match.group(0)] return rc.sub(translate, text)
def getNGrams(wordlist, n): return [wordlist[i:i+n] for i in range(len(wordlist)-(n-1))]
basenumber = raw_input('What is the first id number? ’)number = str(basenumber)numberint = int(basenumber)basenumberend = raw_input('What is the last id number? ’)endnumber = int(basenumberend)
ngram = raw_input('How many words should be in a phrase? ’)ngrams = int(ngram)combifile = 'combine.txt’listopen = open(combifile, "r”)wordlist = listopen.read()splitlist = wordlist.split()listopen.close()ngramslist = getNGrams(splitlist, ngrams)
if ngramslist: ngramslist.sort() last = ngramslist[-1] for i in range(len(ngramslist)-2, -1, -1): if last == ngramslist[i]: del ngramslist[i] else: last = ngramslist[i]
tidystring = '’
for item in ngramslist: number = str(basenumber) numberint = int(basenumber) lineitem = " ".join(item) print lineitem tidystring += str('\n' + lineitem + ',')
while (numberint<=endnumber): file = str(number + ".txt”) fin = open(file, 'r’) text = fin.read() fin.close() if lineitem in text: tidystring += str(number + ',’) numberint = int(number) numberint += 1 number = str(numberint)
# create an excelfile for this exampleexcel_file = "ngramcompiled.csv”fout = open(excel_file, "w”)fout.write(tidystring)fout.close()
+ Computer-Aided Identification of Reprints
+ Understanding Reprint Networks
Meme Identification
Courtesy of Viral Texts Project, http://www.viraltexts.org/
+ Understanding Reprint Spread
Chronological Spread
Courtesy of Viral Texts Project, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwDlyt7jhMs
+Understanding Dissemination
Pathways
Genealogical Model
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Datelines
Sections
Attributions
In-Text References
Maintained Errors
House Style
Inconsistencies
A Faithful Reprint
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Original, Sydney Gazette, 8 November 1815
Reprint, London Courier, 2 January 1817
A Faithful Reprint
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Reprint, London Courier, 2 January 1817
Reprint, Caledonian Mercury, 6 January 1817
A Faithful Reprint
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Reprint, Caledonian Mercury, 6 January 1817
Reprint, Aberdeen Journal, 8 January 1817
A Faithful Reprint
+A Faithful Reprint
+ Manual Construction of Social Networks
The Glasgow Advertiser, 7 October 1793, p. 5
Knoxville, May 11.IT is shocking to describe the bloody scenes thathave lately taken place in this district. TheIndians have killed and scalped a great number ofpersons, among whom is Colonel Isaac Bledose,who was massacred within 150 yards of his ownhouse.
On the 27th instant a body of Indians attackedGreenfield station: they killed John Jervis, anda negro fellow, belonging to Mrs. Tarker. Bythe bravery of three young men, viz. William Nee-ly, William Wilson, and William Hall, the stationwas preserved; they killed two Indians, woundedseveral others, and put them to flight. It is to beremembered, that Neely and Hall had each lost afather and two brothers, and Wilson a brother, bythe savages. Men are now in pursuit of the Indi-ans.
Full Discussion of Dissemination Pathway Available at: http://prezi.com/in4_bqvgmanr/
+Manual Construction of Social
Networks
Derived from Google News Archive, British Library 19th Century Newspapers,
NewspaperArchive.com, Readex Early American Newspapers, Newspapers.com, and the University of Kentucky
+Binary Computer Model
Arbitrary Tolerance Levels
Reference to Additional Tables
Bypassing Missing Nodes
Flexibility
Difficult to Recreate Human Instinct…
…But is That a Bad Thing?
+Phylogenic Model
Phylogenetic Model
Image Courtesy of Fred Hsu (Wikipedia:User:Fredhsu on en.wikipedia) CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
+ Can Computers Replace Historians?
Computer ProgramOCR Clean-up ProcessesDivision into Likely Meme GroupingsVariety of Relatedness Scores
Textual IntegrityPrefixes and SuffixesChronological SeparationChronological-Geographical FeasibilityWell-Worn Path ModifierModeling of Relatedness Factors
Directional Social Network DatabaseRaw Data to Inform Additional Research
Manual CorrectionsDirect Attributions
Parsing Compilations
Initial Discovery of Well-Worn Paths
Inclusion of Offline Materials
(www.mhbeals.com/cnd)
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Hunt or Gather, Share or Steal:Scottish News Networks, 1790-1840
M. H. BealsSheffield Hallam University
@mhbeals
View These Slides
About MeColonial News Database
View This Presentation
After 16 Sept 2014
![Welcome! [] · Use this map and list of today’s activities to explore Old Sturbridge Village. Learn about life in rural New England between 1790 and 1840, and how early American](https://img.pdfslide.net/doc/110x75/5fff7e605553e9506c74c5a3/welcome-use-this-map-and-list-of-todayas-activities-to-explore-old-sturbridge.jpg)
