Talk entitled 'Newspapers as Data' delivered at the Media, Cultural Studies and Journalism Doctoral Open Day, British Library, 24 February 2014. Notes supporting these slides can be found on GitHub Gist https://gist.github.com/drjwbaker/9184318

1. Newspapers as data
Dr James Baker
Curator, Digital Research
@j_w_baker

2. More than resource discovery…
“The emergence of the new
digital humanities [and
social sciences] isn‟t an
isolated academic
phenomenon. The
institutional and disciplinary
changes are part of a larger
cultural shift, inside and
outside the academy, a
rapid cycle of emergence
and convergence in
technology and culture”
Steven E Jones, Emergence of
the Digital Humanities (2013)
www.bl.uk
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3. Raging torrent of data
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4. New Tools
• Metadata, tagging, search,
discovery…
• …mapping, connectivity,
embeddness
• Google Ngram Viewer
– Millions of books, billions of
words
– Granular trend analysis
– New ways in, new contexts
– prison *_NOUN…
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5. New Discoveries
discipline
www.bl.uk
camp and
camps
sentence
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6. New Understanding
• Study of 11M social media posts
from China
– King, Pan, Roberts (2013)
– Chinese government is not
censoring speech but is censoring
“attempts at collective action,
whether for or against the
government”
– Automated text analysis
• NSA, GCHQ, Big Data…
– Just because they use big data,
should we?
– What does/doesn‟t it represent?
– Ethics, use of technology
www.bl.uk
• Quantitative Analysis of Culture
Using Millions of Digitized Books
– New competition for telling stories
about change over time.
– Michel, Aiden et al (2010)
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7. “Reading individual works is
as irrelevant as describing
the architecture of a building
from a single brick, or the
layout of a city from a single
church”
Franco Moretti, Stanford
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8. Adam Crymble
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9. “Faced with this mountain of print, we have two choices: to
continue subjecting tiny fragments of Victorian culture to close
reading, or to supplement this approach by exploring a much
larger proportion of the archive through „distant reading‟.”
Bob Nicholson, „Counting Culture; or, How to
Read Victorian Newspapers from a Distance‟,
Journal of Victorian Culture 17:2 (2012)
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10. Newspaper Man photograph courtesy of
Flickr user Ed Stevenson
/ Creative
Commons Licensed
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11. www.bl.uk
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12. “If each paragraph in the infinite archive, all the
trillions of words, is simply a collection of data,
it immediately becomes something that can be
tied to a series of other things – to
any other bit of data. A name, a date, a
selection of words, or a phrase […] defined as a
polygon on the surface of the earth. In other
words, the texts that form the basis for
western history can now be georeferenced and tied directly to a
historical
/
geographical
understanding of spatial distribution,
which can in turn be cross analysed with any
other series of measures of text – textmining
makes text available for embedding within a
geographical frame.”
Tim Hitchcock, „Place and the Politics of the
Past‟ (2012)
www.bl.uk
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13. “Literary scholars and historians have in the past been limited in their
analyses of print culture by the constraints of physical archives and human
capacity. A lone scholar cannot read, much less make sense
of, millions of newspaper pages. With the aid of computational
linguistics tools and digitized corpora, however, we are working toward a
large-scale, systemic understanding of how texts were valued and
transmitted during this period”
David A. Smith, Ryan Cordell, and Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, „Infectious
Texts: Modeling Text Reuse in Nineteenth-Century Newspapers‟ (2013)
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/dasmith/infect-bighum-2013.pdf
www.bl.uk
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14. “Literary scholars and historians have in the past been limited in their
analyses of print culture by the constraints of physical archives and human
capacity. A lone scholar cannot read, much less make sense
of, millions of newspaper pages. With the aid of computational
linguistics tools and digitized corpora, however, we are working toward a
large-scale, systemic understanding of how texts were valued and
transmitted during this period”
David A. Smith, Ryan Cordell, and Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, „Infectious
Texts: Modeling Text Reuse in Nineteenth-Century Newspapers‟ (2013)
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/dasmith/infect-bighum-2013.pdf
www.bl.uk
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15. “Newspaper digitization has made
good practice easier and „the
availability of a swathe of nineteenthcentury newspaper titles means that
The Times should never again appear
as an isolated authority for historical
events or trends‟ [… But] Now that a
small but representative sample of
provincial newspapers has been
digitized, it is puzzling that so
little scholarship based on them
has been published. This sector of
the press has many unique features
that can enrich our research.”
Andrew Hobbs, „The Deleterious Dominance of
The Times in Nineteenth-Century Scholarship‟,
Journal of Victorian Culture 18:4 (2013)
www.bl.uk
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16. • Spatial Humanities (Lancaster)
• Asymmetrical Encounters: E-Humanity Approaches to Reference
Cultures in Europe, 1815–1992 (Utrecht, Trier, UCL)
• Europeana Newspapers
• Welsh Newspapers Online - National Library of Wales
• …and you?
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17. Task time
For the next few minutes, break into pairs or groups
and consider one or all of the following questions:
– What changes when you turn a news media into data?
• What could you do with digital sources that you couldn‟t do with physical
sources (and vice-versa)?
– What hypothetical analytical tools(s) would improve your
research?
• And what are the barriers to you using them?
– What are the ethical considerations when using digital data?
• Can data offend?
Be prepared to offer a short response!
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18. Thank you!
@j_w_baker
Follow the Digital Scholarship Blog:
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/
Contact us at: digitalresearch@bl.uk
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