| HD-51728-13 | Digital Humanities: Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants | Northeastern University | Uncovering Reprinting Networks in Nineteenth-Century American Newspapers | 5/1/2013 - 12/31/2014 | $59,805.00 | Ryan | | Cordell | | | | Northeastern University | Boston | MA | 02115-5005 | USA | 2013 | Interdisciplinary Studies, General | Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants | Digital Humanities | 59805 | 0 | 59805 | 0 | The development of models, using tools from computational linguistics, to help track the spread of prints and reprints of poetry and short stories throughout 19th-centry newspapers, using the sources found in the Chronicling America database of digitized newspapers.
Uncovering Reprinting Networks in Nineteenth-Century American Newspapers seeks to develop theoretical models that will help scholars better understand what qualities--both textual and thematic--helped particular news stories, short fiction, and poetry "go viral" in nineteenth-century newspapers and magazines. Prior to copyright legislation and enforcement, literary texts as well as other non-fiction prose texts circulated promiscuously among newspapers as editors freely reprinted materials borrowed from other venues. What texts were reprinted and why? How did ideas--literary, political, scientific, economic, religious--circulate in the public sphere and achieve critical force among audiences? By employing and developing computational linguistics tools to analyze the large textual databases of nineteenth-century newspapers newly available to scholars, this project will generate new knowledge of the nineteenth-century print public sphere. |