Month: August 2016

Straying from this blog’s specific theme of Tennessee newspapers (and more broadly, US newspapers), I couldn’t resist posting a link to this sumptuous selection of newspaper-related photographs in today’s Guardian. The images have been compiled as a tribute to the former hub of the British newspaper industry – Fleet Street – which, sees its last two journalists leaving the street today.

This selection of photographs demonstrates what an incredibly labor-intensive industry newspaper publishing was. From the roomful of typesetters nimbly placing rows of metal type and using mallets to secure/loosen the type, the huge rolls of paper pulled by traction engine through the streets for loading into the massive printing presses, and the small army of Press Association messenger boys.

When I used to work in London, my bus journey would take me the length of Fleet Street. I used to know the accuracy of every clock on that route, so the image of the men dismantling the Telegraph clock made me smile. I also vividly remember News International’s departure from Fleet Street (also featured in this selection), and the “Battle of Wapping” that followed.

Although the street is no longer home to the newspaper industry, it is still its spiritual home, and will remain so as long as Christopher Wren’s St Bride’s Church (“the journalist’s church”) is there.

 

 

In November last year, NEH sent out a call for submissions for its Chronicling America Data Challenge. Today, the winners were announced!

You can read more about the challenge and find links to the winning projects here.
Or cut straight to the winning projects:

First Prize
American Public Bible: Biblical Quotations in U.S. Newspapers
Entry By:  Lincoln Mullen, Assistant Professor, Department of History and Art History, George Mason University (Fairfax, VA)

This project tracks Biblical quotations in American newspapers to see how the Bible was used for cultural, religious, social or political purposes.  Users can either enter their own Biblical references or choose from a selection of significant references on a range of topics.  The project draws on both recent digital humanities work tracking the reuse of texts and a deep scholarly interest in the Bible as a cultural text in American life.  The site shows how the Bible was a contested yet common text, including both printed sermons and Sunday school lessons and use of the Bible on every side of issues such as slavery, women’s suffrage and wealth and capitalism.

Second Prize (Tie)
American Lynching: Uncovering a Cultural Narrative
Entry By:  Andrew Bales, PhD Student in Creative Writing, University of Cincinnati (Cincinnati, OH)

This project explores America’s long and dark history with lynching, in which newspapers acted as both a catalyst for public killings and a platform for advocating for reform.  Integrating data sets on lynching created by Tuskegee University, the site sheds light on the gruesome culture of lynching, paying close attention to the victims of violent mobs.  The site allows readers to use an interactive chronological map of victim reports and see their state-by state distribution, linking to Chronicling America articles.

Second Prize (Tie)
Historical Agricultural News
Entry By:  Amy Giroux, Computer Research Specialist, Center for Humanities and Digital Research, University of Central Florida (Orlando, FL)

This site allows users to explore information on the farming organizations, technologies and practices of America’s past.  The site describes farming as the window into communities, social and technological change and concepts like progress, development and modernity.  Agricultural connections are of significance to those interested in various topics, including immigration and assimilation, language use and communication, education and affiliations and demographic transitions.

Third Prize (Tie)
Chronicling Hoosiers
Entry By:  Kristi Palmer, Associate Dean of Digital Scholarship, Indiana University-Purdue University (Indianapolis, IN)

This project tracks the origins of the word “Hoosier.”  The site’s maps visually demonstrate the geographic distribution of the term “Hoosier” in the Chronicling America data set.  This distribution is measured by the number of times the term appears on a newspaper page.  Each point on the map shows a place of publication where a newspaper or newspapers contain the term.  Another feature on the web site is the Word Clouds by Decade visualizations, which are created by looking at the word “Hoosier” in context.  The text immediately surrounding each appearance of the word is extracted and from this the most frequently occurring terms are plotted.

Third Prize (Tie)
USNewsMap.com
Entry By:  Claudio Saunt, Professor, Department of History, Co-Director, Center for Virtual History and Associate Director, Institute of Native American Studies, University of Georgia (Athens, GA)

This site discovers patterns, explores regions, investigates how stories and terms spread around the country and watches information go viral before the era of the internet.  The site argues that newspapers capture the public discourse better than books do because of their quick publication schedule.  For example, users can track “miscegenation,” a term coined in 1863 by a Democratic Party operative to exploit fears about Lincoln, and “scalawag,” a recently arrived term that quickly gained currency after 1869.  Other examples for use are tracking regional differences in language, tracing the path of epidemics and studying changing political discourse over time and space.

K-12 Student Prize
Digital APUSH: Revealing History with Chronicling America
Entry By:  Teacher Ray Palin and A.P. U.S. History Students at Sunapee High School (Sunapee, NH)

These students used Chronicling America newspaper data to create a variety of visualizations —- maps, charts and timelines -— to explore questions about U.S. history.  The projects use word frequency analysis -— a kind of distant reading -— to discover patterns in news coverage.  Some examples of investigations include geographic coverage of Plessy v. Ferguson, temporal trends in the use of the words “secede” and “secession,” articles about Uncle Tom’s Cabin by year, state-by-state coverage of the KKK and geographic trends in coverage of labor unions.

[Project abstracts taken from Leah Weinryb Grohsgal’s article]