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

Abstract

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.

impresso Text Reuse at Scale. An interface for the exploration of text reuse data in semantically enriched historical newspapers

“…Our approach to this problem consisted in providing users with as many filters as possible, as a powerful way of sifting through the large number of clusters extracted by Passim. One example is the long-term reuse of newspaper contents (Salmi et al, 2019), i.e., articles that are reprinted over and over in a relatively long period of time: Users can refine their query by setting a filter on the time span of the cluster, so that only clusters consisting of articles covering a time span of, e.g., 10 years are retained. This first version mainly supports cluster-and documentlevel research with a basic set of search options and filters without distant reading perspectives.…”

‘No “wise” men or women but real doctors!'

“…The table above illustrates how the number of stigmatizing newspaper discourses about magical healing was highest in 1880-99, with thirty-nine texts out of fifty-four. Of these fifty-four newspaper texts, eight were published as duplicates (for reuse of Finnish newspaper texts, see Salmi et al 2021).…”

Topic modelling discourse dynamics in historical newspapers

“…This dataset contains articles from all newspapers and most periodicals that have been published in Finland from 1771 to 1917. Several studies have used parts of this dataset to investigate such issues as the development of the public sphere in Finland, the evolution of ideological terms in nineteenth-century Finland and the changing vocabulary of Finnish newspapers [30,15,14,10,18,19,22,25,11].…”