This article explores media coverage of the European revolutionary turbulence of 1848, particularly the outbreak of the February Revolution in France. By analysing several European newspaper depositories, the article sheds light on the role of newspapers in the spread of revolutionary news in European media space across various political borders and language barriers, connecting continental Europe, Great Britain, and Ireland with the Scandinavian frontiers of the Russian Empire. In our empirical case study, we examine how information on the February Revolution travelled to the Grand Duchy of Finland, an area situated at the crossroads of different communication networks that was influenced by the reactionary politics of Russia but still culturally connected with Sweden. Benefitting from digitized collections of Austrian, British, German, Finnish, and Swedish newspapers, this article provides a transnational perspective on the mid-nineteenth-century European media landscape.

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Th is article explores the ways the emerging concept of humanism was circulated and defi ned in early nineteenth-century German-language press. By analyzing a digitized corpus of German-language newspapers and periodicals published between 1808 and 1850, this article looks into the ways the concept of humanism was employed in book reviews, news, political reports, and feuilleton texts. Newspapers and periodicals had a signifi cant role in transmitting the concept of humanism from educational debates into general political language in the 1840s. Furthermore, in an era of growing social problems and political unrest, humanism became increasingly associated with moral sentiments. Accordingly, this article suggests that its new political meanings and emotional underpinnings made humanism culturally contagious, particularly immediately before and during the 1848/49 revolutions.

Topic modelling is often described as a text-mining tool for conducting a study of hidden semantic structures of a text or a text corpus by extracting topics from a document or a collection of documents. Yet, instead of one singular method, there are various tools for topic modelling that can be utilised for historical research. Dynamic topic models, for example, are often constructed temporally year by year, which makes it possible to track and analyse the ways in which topics change over time. This chapter provides a case example on topic modelling historical primary sources. The chapter uses two tools to carry out topic modelling, MALLET and Dynamic Topic Model (DTM), in one dataset, containing texts from the early 19th-century German-language press which have been subjected to optical character recognition (OCR). All of these texts were discussing humanism, which was a newly emerging concept before mid-century, gaining various meanings in the public discourse before, during and after the 1848–1849 revolutions. Yet, these multiple themes and early interpretations of humanism in the press have been previously under-studied. By analysing the evolution of the topics between 1829 and 1850, this chapter aims to shed light on the change of the discourse surrounding humanism in the early 19th-century German-speaking Europe.