Rights statement: This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Edinburgh University Press in International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing. The Version of Record is available online at: https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/ijhac.2018.0222
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Final published version
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Space and Time in 100 Million Words
T2 - Health and Disease in a Nineteenth-century Newspaper
AU - Porter, Catherine
AU - Atkinson, Paul
AU - Gregory, Ian Norman
N1 - This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Edinburgh University Press in International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing. The Version of Record is available online at: https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/ijhac.2018.0222
PY - 2018/10/24
Y1 - 2018/10/24
N2 - The abundance of information contained in nineteenth-century texts means the traditional ‘close reading’ of Victorian culture has limitations (Nicholson, 2012). Due to its sheer volume, historic newspaper text is one genre that has suffered from such methodological limitations, research questions and outputs often constrained by traditional approaches. With the increasing burgeoning availability of newspapers in digital format, there is a pressing need to look at how we might effectively and efficiently use these digital resources to help answer research questions and add to key historical and geographical debates. Focusing on the analysis of a large digital corpus, this paper has two key foci: (I) to extend on a new tried and tested methodology for the assessment of digital texts using a combination for corpus linguistics and geospatial technologies; and ; (II) apply said methodology to a case study assessing the presentation of health and disease in a nineteenth-century newspaper. The paper illustrates, for the first time, that by linking existing techniques with new and innovative approaches it is possible to temporally and spatially analyse and map themes of interest in large digital texts corpora on a scale not possible through more traditional close reading methods.
AB - The abundance of information contained in nineteenth-century texts means the traditional ‘close reading’ of Victorian culture has limitations (Nicholson, 2012). Due to its sheer volume, historic newspaper text is one genre that has suffered from such methodological limitations, research questions and outputs often constrained by traditional approaches. With the increasing burgeoning availability of newspapers in digital format, there is a pressing need to look at how we might effectively and efficiently use these digital resources to help answer research questions and add to key historical and geographical debates. Focusing on the analysis of a large digital corpus, this paper has two key foci: (I) to extend on a new tried and tested methodology for the assessment of digital texts using a combination for corpus linguistics and geospatial technologies; and ; (II) apply said methodology to a case study assessing the presentation of health and disease in a nineteenth-century newspaper. The paper illustrates, for the first time, that by linking existing techniques with new and innovative approaches it is possible to temporally and spatially analyse and map themes of interest in large digital texts corpora on a scale not possible through more traditional close reading methods.
KW - spatial humanities
KW - GIS
KW - nineteenth-century
KW - health
KW - geographical text analysis
U2 - 10.3366/ijhac.2018.0222
DO - 10.3366/ijhac.2018.0222
M3 - Journal article
VL - 12
SP - 196
EP - 216
JO - International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing
JF - International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing
SN - 1753-8548
IS - 2
ER -