The document discusses a digital history seminar led by Dr. Tessa Hauswedell, focusing on the representation of London in British newspapers from 1870 to 1900 and the semantic evolution of related terms. Using various digital tools and historical newspaper corpora, the research explores transnational influences and the concept of 'metropolitanism' in the context of imperial cities. It concludes that while London took on increasing secular significance in public discourse, it was portrayed distinctly from other European metropolises during the late 19th century.

1. Digital History Seminar, 19 Jan 2016
Dr Tessa Hauswedell
t.hauswedell@ucl.ac.uk

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

13. Pall Mall Gazette, Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon, July 1885

14. Distribution and dispersion breakdown for ‘metropolis’, Source: EEBO accessed via
CQP web processor

15. Collocations for ‘metropolis’ in EEBO corpus, 1600-1699, Source: EEBO corpus,
accessed via the CQPweb processor

16. Collocations for ‘metropolis’ in EEBO corpus, 1700-1799, Source: EEBO corpus,
accessed via the CQPweb processor

17. Source: 18th Burney Newspapers, accessed via Artemis Primary Sources

18. Source: 19th century British Newspapers, accessed via Artemis Primary
Sources

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).

21. Screenshot, Antconc

22. Clusters for ‘metropolis’, 1880-1989, PMGZ, arranged by MI score

23. Collocations for ‘metropolis’, 1890-1899, PMGZ, listed by MI score

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%

25. UCREL Semantic Analysis System
(USAS)
Source: http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/usas/

26. Source: http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/usas/semtags.txt

27. Examples of relevant discourse fields in relation to ‘metropolis’

28. Frequencies for search terms over period 1870-1899. Source: British
Newspaper Archive

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.