Reprinting, Circulation, and the Network Author in Antebellum Newspapers

The reuse of texts in Finnish newspapers and journals, 1771–1920: A digital humanities perspective

“…These have drawn on a range of techniques: text fingerprinting with word n-grams (Citron and Ginsparg 2015), the use of substring matching algorithms (Clough et al 2002), or a full string alignment as in the well-known Passim software developed by David A. Smith in the Viral Texts project. The Passim tool has been successfully used e.g., in a study of American newspapers (Smith, Cordell, and Maddock Dillon 2013;Cordell 2015). Passim applies word n-grams to recognize duplicate texts within a certain threshold, even if the texts differ due to editorial work or OCR issues (Smith, Cordell, and Mullen 2015).…”

“…Moreover, among other reuse cases with long time lags, there are many anonymous texts-minor news, stories, and anecdotes-that lived in the press through text circulation. In the case of nineteenth-century American press, Ryan Cordell (2015) has argued that many circulated texts were different kinds of anonymous stories, snippets, and notices-texts with minor editorial value and thus also ignored in press history. In the case of circulating anecdotes or stories, the question of authorship is of secondary importance.…”

“…For example, the project Knowledge, Information Technology and the Arabic Book analyzed text reuse in the corpus of Arabic texts from the period of 700-1500. Our work on newspapers has been inspired by the Viral Texts project, led by Ryan Cordell and David A. Smith, analyzing text reuse in the nineteenthcentury American press (Smith, Cordell, and Maddock Dillon 2013;Cordell 2015). In the Oceanic Exchanges project, the study of text reuse enlarged to a global scale and brought together researchers from Finland, Germany, Mexico, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States to explore transnational and transcontinental information flows (Oceanic Exchanges Project Team 2017).…”

Walt Whitman’s Poetry Reprints and the Study of Nineteenth-Century Literary Circulation

“…Through the process of selection and republication, editors appropriated the collective authority of the newspaper system, positioning their publication as one node within larger political, social, denominational, or national networks, their content as drawn from and contributing to larger conversations across the medium. 5 This approach decenters the author as an agent in order to draw attention to the force of a publication system in shaping interpretation. But what of the content of reprinted texts?…”

A Braided Narrative for Digital History

“…The blog of an individual scholar or a project blog is 5 6 another way of explaining methodology. Sometimes scholars publish two distinct articles, one on interpretations and the other on methods (e.g., Cordell 2015 andSmith et al 2015). 7 Yet these options are inadequate because they all separate methods and the interpretations that result from them.…”