The GeoNewsMiner (GNM) is an interactive tool that maps and visualises geographical references in... more The GeoNewsMiner (GNM) is an interactive tool that maps and visualises geographical references in historical newspapers. As a use case, we used Italian immigrant newspapers published in the United States from 1898 to 1920, as collected in the corpus ChroniclItaly (Viola 2018). The corpus was previously tagged for entities using a sequence tagging tool (Riedl and Padó 2018). This tagged version of ChroniclItaly is ChroniclItaly 2.0 and it is available as an open access resource. The overarching goal of this project is to offer new perspectives on the geographies of the past. Methodologically, we extracted from the corpus the geographical references, quantified them, geocoded them, and plotted them on a map. As a visualization tool, we developed the GNM App using a Shiny app. This allowed us to present and analyse the results in an intuitive, interactive, and reproduceable way. This documentation is the step-by-step description of the project.
This article aims to offer a methodological contribution to digital humanities by exploring the v... more This article aims to offer a methodological contribution to digital humanities by exploring the value of a mixed-method approach to uncover and understand historical patterns in large quantities of textual data. It refines the distant reading technique of topic modelling (TM) by using the discourse-historical approach (DHA——Wodak, 2001) in order to analyse the mechanisms underlying discursive practices in historical newspapers. Specifically, we investigate public discourses produced by Italian minorities and test the methodology on a corpus of digitized Italian ethnic newspapers published in the USA between 1898 and 1920 (ChroniclItaly—Viola, 2018). This combined methodology, which we suggest to label ‘discourse-driven topic modelling’ (DDTM), enabled us to triangulate linguistic, social, and historical data and to examine how the changing experience of migration, identity construction, and assimilation was reflected over time in the accounts of the minorities themselves. The result...
sell an innovatively modern product, but she also perpetuated a nostalgia for the Old South and “... more sell an innovatively modern product, but she also perpetuated a nostalgia for the Old South and “equated the African American’s place in modern life with servility, obedience, and joviality” (16). Black women like Nancy Green were not the only ones who performed as Mammy. In one of the stronger chapters of the book, McElya discusses the professional and amateur performances of middle and upper-class white women who impersonated enslaved black women, and who wrote faithful slave narratives in an attempt to preserve Confederate history and defend Southern slaveholders and the slaveholding tradition. Interestingly, these performances also enabled white women to validate their class and regional identities. America’s malignant fascination with Mammy has assumed a variety of forms, as we learn from the 1916 Marjorie Delbridge custody case, in which a Chicago juvenile court removed Delbridge from her adoptive mother’s home because she (Delbridge) was white and her mother, Camilla Jackson, was black. White media coverage of the trial and depictions of Jackson as Delbridge’s Mammy provide examples of the exceptions white Americans took to mammy-child relationships that were perceived to provide too much interracial interaction. Yet, paradoxically, white organizations, namely the United Daughters of the Confederacy, endeavored to preserve southern antebellum history and solve the “Negro problem” by proposing a Washington, D.C. monument dedicated to Mammy. According to McElya, these efforts were “an obviously political effort to legitimize [a] distorted version of the southern past” (117). Furthermore, McElya argues, somewhat less convincingly, that those who opposed the monument, notably the black press, linked white America’s obsession with Mammy to the sexual exploitation of black women and the lynching of black men. Other black activists developed “maternal progress narratives” to offer positive views of black motherhood. Still, notions of the faithful slave continued to persist, however, well beyond the Civil Rights era. McElya concludes by returning to the iconic Aunt Jemima and notes how her appearance has changed to reflect modern notions of working black women. One laments the scarcity of voices of black women who actually donned Mammy’s persona; still, McElya’s utilization of primary sources does provide ample, insightful commentary from white women and black and white media. Overall, this is a notable study of an enduring yet problematic American icon. Washington College (Maryland) Alisha R. Knight
In this article, Jaap Verheul, Toine Pieters, and Joris van Eijatten (Utrecht University) discuss... more In this article, Jaap Verheul, Toine Pieters, and Joris van Eijatten (Utrecht University) discuss the text mining tool Texcavator that they use in the Translantis research project, in order to map the emergence of the United States as a reference culture in the Netherlands between 1895 and 1995. Texcavator enables a fine grained analysis of large-scale document collections by using innovative text mining methodologies. It integrates a range of analytical tools such as concept clustering, sentiment mining, and Named Entity Recognition, to produce world clouds, time lines and other visualizations on-the-fly.
In different times, people use different words to describe concepts. Change and stability in word... more In different times, people use different words to describe concepts. Change and stability in word usage are possible indicators of wider socio-cultural changes. To gain insight into how people perceive concepts, it is valuable to trace how the words denoting a certain concept change over time. Existing tools for exploring historical concepts, such as keyword searching or topic modeling, are ill-suited for the task; they are either too top-down or too rigid for an iterative exploration of historical concepts in large data sets. In this article, we present ShiCo: a graphical interface for visualising concepts over time by monitoring shifts in word usage in a document corpus. As the dimension of time plays a crucial role in ShiCo, this article demonstrates ShiCo on a large corpus of newspaper articles spanning several decades. We describe the design choices made during the development of ShiCo and the key parameters that control the tool's behaviour. Lastly, as ShiCo is meant to be...
This short paper reports on the progress of a large, European-funded digital history research pro... more This short paper reports on the progress of a large, European-funded digital history research project that uses text- and sentiment-mining in long runs of large historical newspapers to investigate the question how so-called reference cultures over time have contributed to the emergence of a common European cultural identity. In combining multilingual and transnational text-mining with literary and historical interpretative scholarship the project seeks to develop a quantitative approach to the history of mentalities in Europe.
The GeoNewsMiner (GNM) is an interactive tool that maps and visualises geographical references in... more The GeoNewsMiner (GNM) is an interactive tool that maps and visualises geographical references in historical newspapers. As a use case, we used Italian immigrant newspapers published in the United States from 1898 to 1920, as collected in the corpus ChroniclItaly (Viola 2018). The corpus was previously tagged for entities using a sequence tagging tool (Riedl and Padó 2018). This tagged version of ChroniclItaly is ChroniclItaly 2.0 and it is available as an open access resource. The overarching goal of this project is to offer new perspectives on the geographies of the past. Methodologically, we extracted from the corpus the geographical references, quantified them, geocoded them, and plotted them on a map. As a visualization tool, we developed the GNM App using a Shiny app. This allowed us to present and analyse the results in an intuitive, interactive, and reproduceable way. This documentation is the step-by-step description of the project.
This article aims to offer a methodological contribution to digital humanities by exploring the v... more This article aims to offer a methodological contribution to digital humanities by exploring the value of a mixed-method approach to uncover and understand historical patterns in large quantities of textual data. It refines the distant reading technique of topic modelling (TM) by using the discourse-historical approach (DHA——Wodak, 2001) in order to analyse the mechanisms underlying discursive practices in historical newspapers. Specifically, we investigate public discourses produced by Italian minorities and test the methodology on a corpus of digitized Italian ethnic newspapers published in the USA between 1898 and 1920 (ChroniclItaly—Viola, 2018). This combined methodology, which we suggest to label ‘discourse-driven topic modelling’ (DDTM), enabled us to triangulate linguistic, social, and historical data and to examine how the changing experience of migration, identity construction, and assimilation was reflected over time in the accounts of the minorities themselves. The result...
sell an innovatively modern product, but she also perpetuated a nostalgia for the Old South and “... more sell an innovatively modern product, but she also perpetuated a nostalgia for the Old South and “equated the African American’s place in modern life with servility, obedience, and joviality” (16). Black women like Nancy Green were not the only ones who performed as Mammy. In one of the stronger chapters of the book, McElya discusses the professional and amateur performances of middle and upper-class white women who impersonated enslaved black women, and who wrote faithful slave narratives in an attempt to preserve Confederate history and defend Southern slaveholders and the slaveholding tradition. Interestingly, these performances also enabled white women to validate their class and regional identities. America’s malignant fascination with Mammy has assumed a variety of forms, as we learn from the 1916 Marjorie Delbridge custody case, in which a Chicago juvenile court removed Delbridge from her adoptive mother’s home because she (Delbridge) was white and her mother, Camilla Jackson, was black. White media coverage of the trial and depictions of Jackson as Delbridge’s Mammy provide examples of the exceptions white Americans took to mammy-child relationships that were perceived to provide too much interracial interaction. Yet, paradoxically, white organizations, namely the United Daughters of the Confederacy, endeavored to preserve southern antebellum history and solve the “Negro problem” by proposing a Washington, D.C. monument dedicated to Mammy. According to McElya, these efforts were “an obviously political effort to legitimize [a] distorted version of the southern past” (117). Furthermore, McElya argues, somewhat less convincingly, that those who opposed the monument, notably the black press, linked white America’s obsession with Mammy to the sexual exploitation of black women and the lynching of black men. Other black activists developed “maternal progress narratives” to offer positive views of black motherhood. Still, notions of the faithful slave continued to persist, however, well beyond the Civil Rights era. McElya concludes by returning to the iconic Aunt Jemima and notes how her appearance has changed to reflect modern notions of working black women. One laments the scarcity of voices of black women who actually donned Mammy’s persona; still, McElya’s utilization of primary sources does provide ample, insightful commentary from white women and black and white media. Overall, this is a notable study of an enduring yet problematic American icon. Washington College (Maryland) Alisha R. Knight
In this article, Jaap Verheul, Toine Pieters, and Joris van Eijatten (Utrecht University) discuss... more In this article, Jaap Verheul, Toine Pieters, and Joris van Eijatten (Utrecht University) discuss the text mining tool Texcavator that they use in the Translantis research project, in order to map the emergence of the United States as a reference culture in the Netherlands between 1895 and 1995. Texcavator enables a fine grained analysis of large-scale document collections by using innovative text mining methodologies. It integrates a range of analytical tools such as concept clustering, sentiment mining, and Named Entity Recognition, to produce world clouds, time lines and other visualizations on-the-fly.
In different times, people use different words to describe concepts. Change and stability in word... more In different times, people use different words to describe concepts. Change and stability in word usage are possible indicators of wider socio-cultural changes. To gain insight into how people perceive concepts, it is valuable to trace how the words denoting a certain concept change over time. Existing tools for exploring historical concepts, such as keyword searching or topic modeling, are ill-suited for the task; they are either too top-down or too rigid for an iterative exploration of historical concepts in large data sets. In this article, we present ShiCo: a graphical interface for visualising concepts over time by monitoring shifts in word usage in a document corpus. As the dimension of time plays a crucial role in ShiCo, this article demonstrates ShiCo on a large corpus of newspaper articles spanning several decades. We describe the design choices made during the development of ShiCo and the key parameters that control the tool's behaviour. Lastly, as ShiCo is meant to be...
This short paper reports on the progress of a large, European-funded digital history research pro... more This short paper reports on the progress of a large, European-funded digital history research project that uses text- and sentiment-mining in long runs of large historical newspapers to investigate the question how so-called reference cultures over time have contributed to the emergence of a common European cultural identity. In combining multilingual and transnational text-mining with literary and historical interpretative scholarship the project seeks to develop a quantitative approach to the history of mentalities in Europe.
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