Tessa Hauswedell
Digital History Seminar
Institute of Historical Research
19 January 2016
http://ihrdighist.blogs.sas.ac.uk/2015/12/14/tuesday-19-january-2016-tessa-hauswedell-european-or-imperial-metropolis-depictions-of-london-in-british-newspapers-1870-1900/
2. European or Imperial Metropolis? Depictions
of London in British Newspapers 1870-1900
3. Historical semantics
Tracking changing meaning of terms over time,
space, and across different cultural contexts
Challenge lies in tracking these changing meanings in
diachronic corpora.
4. Background to research
Part of a European funded research project funded by
HERA.
‘Asymmetrical Encounters’ (asymenc.eu) uses digital
tools on 19th and 20th century newspaper corpora to
trace questions of transnational influences and role of
‘reference cultures’ in Europe between larger and
smaller West European countries.
5. Sources used
EEBO (Early English Books Online)
The Burney Collection: 17th and 18th Century
Newspaper Corpus
British Newspaper Archive: 19th Century
Pall Mall Gazette (full text archive from 1870-1900,
with thanks to British Library and J. Baker in
particular)
6. Tools and software used
Antconc
CQP (Corpus Query Processor)
UCREL semantic tagset
All devised and maintained by Lancaster University,
freely available software
7. Methods
Collocation Analysis provides insight into common
and frequent contexts within which a word is used.
N-Gram or Cluster Analysis ( also called lexical
bundle) provides a sequence of words that form an
expression.
8. Paul Villars, London and its Environs. A picturesque survey of the metropolis and the
suburbs, p.5, 1888 Source: British Library Flickr Images
9. Illustrated London, or, a series of views in the British metropolis and its vicinity,
p.157. Source: British Library, Flickr Images
10. ‘Metropolitanism’ as a term to describe the concerted
effort in 19th century to reshape relevant European
centers into dominant imperial/commercial centers.
‘the only cities that could afford such reshaping were
those that benefited from the colonial economy, the
metropoles of London, Paris and Vienna. Other colonial
capitals, like Amsterdam, Brussels, St. Petersburg, and
Berlin, and industrial ports, like New York, would follow
along as best they could, but always in the shadow of
these three metropolises’ (Rotenberg, ‘Metropolitanism
and the transformation of urban space’, American
Anthropologist, 2001, p.9)
11. Claim that late nineteenth century discourse on
London took place within an ‘pan European
discourse’.
Necessary to acknowledge the ‘distinctively European
dimension to the modern imperial city’.
(Driver and Gilbert, ‘Capital and empire: geographies
of imperial London’, Geojournal, (2005) p. 23
12. Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, December 12 1874, British Newspaper
Archive
19. AntConc
Cluster or N-gram Analysis
Provides contiguous sequence
of words that form an
expression, can be any x-
number of n-grams
Here between 2 and 5 n-grams
Performed separately to the left
and to the right (before and after
the term) and for each decade
separately
Collocation Analysis
Provides terms of words that co-
occur frequently
A span of +/- 5 words
Collocation control can include
sentence boundaries
Calculated on the basis of
Mutual Information Score
Performed for each decade
separately
20. Mutual Information Score
Common method to gain insight into actual strength of
the collocation
Calculated on the basis of the number of times two
given words occur together versus number of times
they occur separately.
The higher the score, the more likely that they are not
occurring together by chance.
Can overestimate the score for collocations with very
low occurrences (less than 10).
24. UCREL semantic tagset
Automated software tool for semantic annotation of
texts
Includes 21 major discourse fields with subdivisions,
established as tagset for the semantic analysis of
terms in corpus linguistics
Has 98 % lexical coverage for the 19th century,
through resources from EEBO as lexica
Error rate of 8.95%
29. Frames for the imperial
metropolis
In a political context linked to discussions on the
British Empire
In a national context relating to relations with Scotland
and or Ireland
In relation to architectural schemes and infrastructure
projects
In a historical context, as a comparison to cities of
classical antiquity
30. Conclusions
From initially religious to more secular meaning and
increasing usage in public discourse throughout
nineteenth century.
In the PMGZ, related to wide field of topical debates,
but no evidence of an implied European dimension in
relation to the metropolis, but instead to national
concerns.
Overall London is presented as a metropolis quite
distinct from European counterparts in the late
nineteenth century.