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  • Hastings et al - Accepted Manuscript

    Rights statement: This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in Historical Methods on 16/07/2015, available online:http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/01615440.2014.995390

    Accepted author manuscript, 308 KB, PDF document

    Available under license: CC BY-NC: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

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Explaining geographical variations in English rural infant mortality decline using place-centred reading

Research output: Contribution to Journal/MagazineJournal articlepeer-review

Published
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>2015
<mark>Journal</mark>Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History
Issue number3
Volume48
Number of pages13
Pages (from-to)128-140
Publication StatusPublished
Early online date16/07/15
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

Making effective use of digital texts is one of the major challenges facing the humanities. This paper explores a novel method of using a large corpus of British newspapers to help explain why three neighbouring rural districts in England showed very different patterns of infant mortality decline in the second half of the nineteenth century. Quantitative analysis does not reveal any major differences between these districts that might explain this. Repeatedly querying the corpus using different combinations of search-terms and placenames,
we show significant differences in the quality of local government between these
districts. We argue that place-centred reading, as we term this approach, can be used to help explain patterns found using conventional quantitative Geographical Information Systems (GIS) approaches.

Bibliographic note

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in Historical Methods on 16/07/2015, available online:http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/01615440.2014.995390