What Made the Front Page in the 19th Century?: Computationally Classifying Genre in “Viral Texts” - Jonathan D. Fitzgerald

1. What Made the Front
Page in the 19th Century?
Computationally Classifying Genre in “Viral Texts”
Jonathan D. Fitzgerald
Northeastern University
@jon_fitzgerald

2. Ryan Cordell, “Reprinting, Circulation, and the Network Author in Antebellum
Newspapers”
“When every nineteenth-century newspaper
brims with original and reprinted content of all
kinds, it is difficult to know where to even begin
studying that content.”
@jon_fitzgerald

3. @jon_fitzgerald
loveletter.viraltexts.org

4. @jon_fitzgerald

5. Christof Schöch, “Topic Modeling Genre: An Exploration of French Classical and
Enlightenment Drama”
“The concept of literary genre is a highly
complex one: not only are different genres
frequently defined on several, but not necessarily
the same levels of description, but consideration
of genres as cognitive, social, or scholarly
constructs with a rich history further complicate
the matter.”
@jon_fitzgerald

6. Ted Underwood, “Understanding Genre in a Collection of a Million Volumes"
“Centuries of literary scholarship have failed to
produce human consensus about genre.”
@jon_fitzgerald

7. Ted Underwood, “Distant reading and the blurry edges of genre”
“The model was trained, after all, on examples
tagged by human beings; the whole point of
doing that was to reproduce as much as
possible the contours of the boundary that
separates genres for us.”
@jon_fitzgerald

8. Benjamin Schmidt, “Genre Classification from Topic models”
“To reduce dimensionality into the model, we
have been thinking of using a topic model as the
classifiers instead of the tokens. The idea is that
classifiers with more than several dozen
variables tend to get finicky and hard to interpret,
and with more than a few hundred become
completely unmanageable.”
@jon_fitzgerald

9. Topic Model of 4,000
Clusters
god life world heart love man time good men make
court sir called judge de states government united congress made
tbe jones _ trumble noble 000 10 cent year 30
tile thle tie tihe thie water feet cold hot put
years hundred year paper twenty gen men enemy general left
tho bo ho nnd aro ot ii ol la aud
people great country public con dr blood cure stomach health
states united president state mr
@jon_fitzgerald

10. Genre Assignments
@jon_fitzgerald

11. Classification Accuracy by
Genre
Actual Genre Percent Right
advertisement 92.99325
news 87.48239
poetry 83.76231
prose 66.91618
@jon_fitzgerald

12. 25 Clusters with Genre Probabilities
@jon_fitzgerald

13. 25 Clusters with Genre Probabilities
WAGES IN 1800. The condition of the wages-
class of that day may well be examined; it is full
of instruction for social agitators. In the great
cities unskilled workmen were hired by the day,
bought their own food and found their own
lodgings. But in the country, on the farms, or
wherever a band was employed on some
public work, they were fed and lodged by the
employer and given a few dollars a month. On
the Pennsylvania canals the diggers ate the
coarsest diet, were housed in the rudest sheds,
and paid $6 a month from May to November,
and $5 a month from November to May.
@jon_fitzgerald

14. 25 Clusters with Genre Probabilities
@jon_fitzgerald

15. 25 Clusters with Genre Probabilities
@jon_fitzgerald

16. @jon_fitzgerald

17. Matthew Jockers, Macroanalysis
“…lead us not only to a deeper understanding of
the genres…but also to clearer definitions of
genre itself.”
@jon_fitzgerald

18. A HORSE’S PETITION TO HIS DRIVER.
Going up hill, whip me not.
Coming down hill, hurry me not.
On level tread, spare me not.
Loose in stable, forget me not.
Tired or hot, wash me not.
If sick or old, chill me not.
With bit and reins, Oh! jerk me not,
And when you are angry, strike me not
@jon_fitzgerald

19. @jon_fitzgerald

20. Matthew Jockers & David Mimno, “Significant themes in 19th-century literature"
“The models we present here cannot represent
the full meaning of individual books any more
than satellite photos can show the details of
individual trees. Like the satellite view, however,
these macro-, or ‘distant-,’ scale perspectives on
literature offer scholars a necessary context for
and complement to closer readings.”
@jon_fitzgerald

21. Thank you.
@jon_fitzgerald