Bob Nicholson

The Digital Turn: Exploring the methodological possibilities of digital newspaper archives

Advances in digital technology have made the recent past seem like a foreign country. Media historians did things very differently in 2002. In the last decade, hundreds of historical newspapers and periodicals have been digitised and made available to researchers via online archives. Whilst the emergence of these resources has generated contrasting responses from historians, an increasing number of researchers are now embracing the new methodological possibilities created by keyword-searchable digital archives. As the first examples of this scholarship begin to appear on the horizon, this paper considers whether media history is on the cusp of a ‘digital turn’. It outlines the existing responses to digital methodologies, deconstructs digital newspapers in order to explore how they differ from their paper originals and uses case studies drawn from my own research into the late-Victorian transatlantic press to demonstrate how new methodologies might be applied.

‘You Kick the Bucket; We Do the Rest!’: Jokes and the Culture of Reprinting in the Transatlantic Press

In December 1893 the Conservative candidate for Flintshire addressed an audience at Mold Constitutional Club. After he had finished attacking Gladstone and the local Liberal incumbent, he ended his speech with a joke. He advised the Conservative party to adopt, with regard to the government, the sign of an American undertaker: ‘You kick the bucket; we do the rest’. How did a sign belonging to a Nevadan undertaker become the subject of a joke told at a political meeting in North Wales? This unlikely question forms the basis of this article. Using new digital archives, it tracks the journey of the gag from its origins in New York, its travels around America, its trip across the Atlantic, its circulation throughout Britain and its eventual leap into political discourse. The article uses the joke to illuminate the workings of a broader culture of transatlantic reprinting. During the final quarter of the nineteenth century miscellaneous ‘snippets’ cut from the pages of the American press became a staple featur...

JONATHAN'S JOKES: American humour in the late-Victorian press

During the final quarter of the nineteenth century, columns of American jokes became a regular feature of numerous British newspapers. The Newcastle Weekly Currant, for example, had a weekly column of ‘Yankee Snacks’; The North Wales Chronicle had ‘American Humour’; the Hampshire Telegraph its ‘Jonathans Jokes’; and the Northern Weekly Gazette sported a ‘Stars and Stripes’ column. Lloyds Weekly Newspaper introduced a regular column of ‘American Jokes’ in 1896, the same year it achieved an unprecedented circulation of one million readers. Almost half a century before Hollywood, here was a distinctively American form of popular culture which took Britain by storm. It has, however, received little academic attention. This article explores the development of the American humour column, considers the way in which it was consumed by British readers, and argues that these seemingly ephemeral jokes played a key role in shaping Victorian encounters with America.

In Search of America: Topic modelling nineteenth-century newspaper archives

This article considers how, and why, “Topic Modelling” tools can be used to analyse historical newspaper archives. While a growing number of media and communication studies projects have applied these techniques to corpuses of born-digital journalism, using the same tools to analyse large-scale collections of historical newspapers requires us to overcome additional technological and methodological challenges. Our discussion is framed around a historical case study examining references to the United States in the 19th Century British Library Newspaper Archive. The article begins by highlighting the problems that researchers of both digital and historical journalism face when attempting to deal with an enormous body of evidence. Next, it argues that Topic Modelling offers one potential solution to these problems by providing a way to “distant read” the archive. The remainder of the article is divided into five experiments that demonstrate how Topic Modelling can be applied to a series of research questions, each of which is applicable to other projects that might make use of newspaper archives. As well as demonstrating the investigative potential of topic modelling, the article also highlights the practical and technological barriers that currently undermine its effectiveness, particularly when it is applied to archives of historical material.

How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain

Leah Price, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2012, 350 pp, £19.95 (hardback), ISBN 9780691114170 The most useful book I own is a sociological study of race relations in 1970s Bristol. At leas...

Making headlines: the American Revolution as seen through the British press

guided by public opinion, but is governed by the knowing proviso, ‘insofar as the Lords could understand it’ (p. 180); and several of his rather brief analytical passages are given to what might be seen as periods of parliamentary self-education, if not self-help (p. 185). Dr Davis is at pains to argue that, in practice, the Commons and the Lords worked in concert to achieve aims that now seem unfashionably undemocratic – such as protecting Protestant property, keeping powers of police justice under the Crown, and limiting the self-government of cities. Seeming paradoxes emerge, only to dissolve on closer inspection – such is the history of Lord Lyndhurst as a champion of colonial rights, who also upheld the proprietary rights of slave owners (p. 246). It is not always obvious, as Dr Davis acknowledges, that, to quote the Earl of Ripon, the Lords ‘had always shown themselves to be the real friends of freedom’ (p. 218). Indeed, governed by such friends, who needs enemies? On this score, Wellington had few doubts. The mob must be resisted, if only in the interests of the mob. As Edward Pearce has written, ‘the Great Reform Act deserves its ardent Victorian adjective’; in fact, for all its limitations, the nation had earned it. By 1832, we are shown, the Lords knew they had to bow to public opinion. (p. 341). In Dr Davis’s view, ‘what they did not believe was that the Whig Commons represented public opinion’. What Britain had was a House that, like the Government, rarely appealed to the common people. Indeed, it was the Conservatives and the Lords that threw out or reshaped measures on Irish tithes, municipal government, access to Oxbridge, support of elementary education, and the abolition of colonial slavery. Perhaps Dr Davis is right in concluding that such behaviour, however unattractive to modern eyes, ‘did not seriously disturb the British public at the time’ (p. 342). In which case, the House may indeed be said to reflect the triumph of what Alexandra Kelso calls ‘historical institutionalism’. Wellington’s regime, both in Government and in the Lords – and the legislative victories that, in Dr Davis’s words, he famously scored ‘for the church and against the government’ (p. 198) – might never be repeated; but his views about the proper function of the Lords could be taken as wise counsel for future peers. ‘We have only now to follow,’ he said in 1834, ‘a plain course with moderation and dignity in order to attain a very great, if not a preponderating influence over the affairs of the country’ (p. 198). The lesson was well taken. For Macaulay, observant as ever, the monarchy and the aristocracy (including the Lords) were (and perhaps are still) ‘valuable and useful as means, not as ends.’ With luck, those who come to fashion the next chapter in the history of the House will keep this in mind.