From their earliest incarnations in the seventeenth-century, through their Georgian expansion into provincial and colonial markets and culminating in their late-Victorian transformation into New Journalism, British newspapers have relied upon scissors-and-paste journalism to meet consumer demands for the latest political intelligence and diverting content. Although this practice, wherein one newspaper extracted or wholly duplicated content from another, is well known to scholars of the periodical press, in-depth analysis of the process is hindered by the lack of formal records relating to the reprinting process. Although anecdotes abound, attributions were rarely and inconsistently given and, with no legal requirement to recompense the original author, formal records of where material was obtained were unnecessary. Even if they had existed, the number of titles that relied upon reprinted material makes systematic analysis impossible; for many periodicals, only a few issues, let alone business records, survive. However, mass digitisation of these periodicals, in both photographic and machine-readable form, offers historians a new opportunity to rediscover the mechanics of nineteenth-century reprinting. By undertaking multi-modal and multi-scale analyses of digitised periodicals, we can begin to reconstruct the precise journeys these texts took from their first appearance to their multiple ends. Moreover, by repurposing individual ‘boutique’ research outputs within large-scale textual analyses, we can greatly enhance the resolution of our computer-aided conclusions and bridge the gaps between commercial, state and private databases. This paper will explore the possibilities of large-scale reprint identification, using out-of-the-box and project-specific software and the nature of multi-scale analysis and how we might best reintegrate ‘boutique’ research into large-scale text-mining projects.

1. BOUTIQUE BIG DATA
Understanding 19th-Century Reprint Culture With Plagiarism Detection Software
M. H. Beals (ORCID: 0000-0002-2907-3313)
Loughborough University
@MHBEALS

2. THE HISTORICAL PROBLEM
• Culture of Reprinting in 18th and 19th Centuries
• Inconsistent Attribution
• Inconsistent Survival of Network Components
• Limited Historiographical Resources
Image Courtesy of Mike Licht (CC BY) at https://www.flickr.com/photos/notionscapital/2313507405

3. SEARCH AND TRANSCRIBE
Left Image Courtesy of Dan Tantrum (CC BY NC ND) at https://www.flickr.com/photos/tantrum_dan/2344581860

4. Meta Data
Page Text

6. COPYFIND REPRINT DETECTION
• Freeware Programme Developed by Lou Bloomfield
http://plagiarism.bloomfieldmedia.com/z-wordpress/software/copyfind/
• Highly Customisable Search As Well as Open Source
• Measures Left, Right and Overall Matches
• Displays Left-Right Comparisons of Text
• Extremely Effective at Discovering OCR-Transcribed Matches
Image Courtesy of the Lou Bloomfield at http://rabi.phys.virginia.edu/lab3e/

8. COPYFIND REPRINT DETECTION
• Freeware Programme Developed by Lou Bloomfield
http://plagiarism.bloomfieldmedia.com/z-wordpress/software/copyfind/
• Highly Customisable Search As Well as Open Source
• Measures Left, Right and Overall Matches
• Displays Left-Right Comparisons of Text
• Extremely Effective at Discovering OCR-Transcribed Matches
Image Courtesy of the Lou Bloomfield at http://rabi.phys.virginia.edu/lab3e/

10. ESTABLISHING LIKELY CANDIDATES
• Single Year (1810-1819) Contained over 200,000 Possible Matches
• Removed Internal (Same Title) Reprints
• Restricted Match Size (90 Right, 90 Left or 160 Overall)
• Restricted Date Separation (200 Days)

11. 1810 1811 1812 1813
1814 1815 1816 1817

12. DIRECTIONALITY
• Reprint Maps are Non-Linear, Similar to
Phytogenic Trees
• Paths of Specific Branches Dictated by
Date, Content, Errors
• Similar Method to Meme-Tracking
(Adamic et al, 2014)
• Attributions Are Often Red Herrings

13. 1818-1819

14. “WITHIN THIS COLLECTION”

15. WWW.SCISSORSANDPASTE.NET

16. WWW.GITHUB.COM/MHBEALS/SCISSORSANDPASTE

17. THANK YOU
M. H. Beals (ORCID: 0000-0002-2907-3313)
Loughborough University
@MHBEALS