Oceanic Exchanges: Tracing Global Information Networks in Historical Newspaper Repositories, 1840-1914

• Applicants: Dr. Steffen Koch; Professor Dr. Sebastian Padó; Professor Dr. Marc Priewe
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History ; Image and Language Processing, Computer Graphics and Visualisation, Human Computer Interaction, Ubiquitous and Wearable Computing ; European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: from 2017 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 329210141

Newspapers were the first big data for a mass audience. Their dramatic expansion over the long nineteenth century created a global culture of abundant information. Yet the significance of the newspaper has largely been defined in national terms in literary-historical scholarship of the period, and newspapers are predominantly collected, digitized, and accessed through nationally-focused institutions. "Oceanic Exchanges: Tracing Global Information Networks in Historical Newspaper Repositories, 1840-1914" (OcEx) brings together leading efforts in computational periodicals research to examine patterns of information flow across national and linguistic boundaries in nineteenth century newspapers and to link insights across large-scale corpora of digitized newspapers from national collections. For scholars of nineteenth century periodical culture and intellectual history, OcEx reframes how we understand the historical emergence of a globally-connected information network. It uncovers the ways that the international was refracted through the local as news, advice, vignettes, popular science, poetry, fiction, and more, all circulating around the globe and through multiple translations. By revealing the global networks through which texts and topics traveled in the period, OcEx promises to create an abundance of new evidence about how readers around the world perceived each other through the newspaper, evidence that will be of great interest to scholars in various fields. Computational linguistics and visualization provide a number of building blocks (recognizing translation, paraphrasing, text reuse, etc.) that can play enabling roles in scholarly investigations, with both historical and contemporary implications. At the same time, such methods raise fundamental questions regarding the validity and reliability of their results (such as the effects of noise in optical character recognition). Finally, by linking research across large-scale digital newspaper collections, OcEx will offer a model for national libraries and others developing large-scale data for digital scholarship. In tracing the ways texts, topics, and concepts crossed national and linguistic boundaries, Oceanic Exchanges seeks to break through the conceptual, institutional, and political barriers which have limited the promise of big data in the humanities: by bringing together historical newspaper experts from different countries and disciplines around common questions; by actively crossing the national boundaries that have previously separated digitized newspaper corpora, as well as those dividing public and private collections, through computational analysis; and by illustrating and making the global connectedness of nineteenth-century newspapers interactively explorable in ways hidden by typical organizations of digital cultural heritage along national lines.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Finland, Mexico, Netherlands, United Kingdom, USA
• Cooperation Partners: Professor Ryan Cordell; Isabel Galina Russell; Hannu Salmi; Professor Dr. Ulrich Tiedau; Jaap Verheul