Reporting the EmpireThe Pall Mall Gazette 1870-1900

Tessa Hauswedell, Asymenc, University College LondonMelvin Wevers, Translantis, Utrecht University

Research Questions

● What insights can distant reading methods provide into the reporting of empire?

● Can we detect trends, patterns that will give us new insights into how newspapers reported about the colonies - and the British Empire overall at home to its readers, on a larger timescale (30 years, 1870-1900)

The Pall Mall Gazette● Digitised version from 1870-1900 with high quality OCR

● London-based evening newspaper

● Small circulation but influential editor William Stead

● Newspapers played a vital role in communicating the British empire at home, increasingly so from the 1870s onwards with advent of professional news agencies and improvements in technology (underwater cables etc) which enabled speedier reporting of news.

British Newspapers and Empire

● Widespread view amongst historians that the press was crucial in gaining support for the empire domestically.

● But few actual studies conclusively demonstrate this.

● Studying smaller newspaper might therefore add more nuance to th picture.

Methods Used

● Four techniques from corpus linguistics:

o Word Frequencies (AntConc)

o Named Entity Recognition (StanfordNER) +

Geomapping (Google Fusion Tables)

o Topic Modeling (Mallet)

o Collocation Analysis (AntConc)

DH Workflows (1) NER

● Extract entities: locations over 30-year

period

● January and July newspapers (n>20)

● Used the output to generate a heatmap in

Google Fusion Tables

Visualization

AntConc Frequencies (2)

● Count the mentioned of cities

● Dominance of Paris > bump in 1870-1871 Franco-

Prussian War > not for Berlin though

● New York most prominent American city

● Fall in mentions of European vis-a-vis American cities

(90 percent in 1870 to 78 percent in 1900)

DH Workflows (3) - Topic Modeling

● Topic model for each year 1870-1900 (50 topics, 15 words, 200

iterations)

● Using TextVoyant > distinctive locations

o 1878: Russian, Treaty, Russia, Cyprus

o 1882: Egypt, Egyptian

o 1890: Ireland, Chicago, Colony

o 1900: Peking, Paris, China, Bloemfontein, Sydney

● Find topic words for these words

Topic Modeling (1878 & 1890)● jan peace armistice war january interests russian aged constantinople pasha dec russia england turkish

grand● engraved russian russians forster bread fortifications turk humour gipsy bulgarians organ lewis statue

loud orloff● oct berlin light started cyprus church november collision envoy asia treaty river gas socialist musical ● feb fleet russia constantinople pope russian meeting conference derby february dardanelles gallipolli

british conditions div

● colonies colony Conference hon penny National labour postage Parnell pupil Bench Museum expenditure Randolph colonial

● Parnell Mr Irish PARNELL party Ireland leader Rule Koch thle Home leadership Shea Dr political● Teufel October September Ireland nurses Congress Birchall Comte Church PILLS hospital Hospital life Sept terrier● calling Victoria Trains Class Returning lead Junction Chicago Fare Fares Isle avenue Guards yards Return● lIlocblob April Stanley artist Davis licences Goschen ROAD Jones WEDDING painter Chicago Fred PRESENTS

collieries

Cluster / Collocation Analysis (AntConc)

● AntConc Enables concordancing and

collocations, as well as cluster or n-gram

analysis

● In sets of ten years

Cluster Analysis Right, Example OutputTotal No. of Cluster Types: 39#Total No. of Cluster Tokens: 14751 742 10 the british2 354 10 of the british3 50 10 in the british4 35 9 to the british5 20 9 and the british6 20 9 that the british7 17 8 part of the british8 17 6 throughout the british9 16 7 for the british10 15 7 parts of the british11 11 6 portion of the british12 9 6 all parts of the british13 9 2 colonies of the british14 9 4 up the british15 9 7 with the british16 8 2 classes throughout the british

Themes for further research

Future vs Past

Part or Whole

Class vs Race

Conclusions

● Use of different techniques to create contrast

● Every method has shortcomings

● International outlook of Empire

● We have found strands to further investigate using

directed close-reading keyword searches