The digital collections of newspapers have given rise to a growing interest in studying them with computational methods. This article contributes to this discussion by presenting a method for detecting text reuse in a large corpus of digitized texts. Empirically, the article is based on the corpus of newspapers and journals from the collection of the National Library of Finland. Often, digitized repositories offer only partial views of what actually was published in printed form. The Finnish collection is unique, however, since it covers all published issues up to the year 1920. This article has a twofold objective: methodologically, it explores how computational methods can be developed so that text reuse can be effectively identified; empirically, the article concentrates on how the circulation of texts developed in Finland from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century and what this reveals about the transformation of public discourse in Finland. According to our results, the reuse of texts was an integral part of the press throughout the studied period, which, on the other hand, was part of a wider transnational practice.

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This article sheds light on the period of revolutionary turbulence by demonstrating how the concept of revolution was introduced in the Finnish print culture through foreign news reports during the early nineteenth century. The examination draws on the use of multilingual digital newspaper collections provided by the National Library of Finland. By combining key word searches to a close reading of newspaper texts, the article explores the ways in which different revolutionary movements were present in the Finnish newspapers during the early decades of the nineteenth century. The article proposes that the role of foreign news flow was crucial in the process of shaping the understanding of revolution in Finland.

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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