A page from ’The Schulenburg Sticker,’ one of the dozens of historical newspapers cataloged in Mapping Texts.
An all-consuming public interest in family, religion and football in modern rural Texas is just one of the cultural snapshots that can be culled from Mapping Texts , a new interactive database that generates graphical interpretations of language trends embedded in over 230,000 pages of Texas newspapers from the late 1820s through the early 2000s.
A collaborative initiative between the University of North Texas and Stanford’s Bill Lane Center for the American West , Mapping Texts is sponsored by a Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The project team – led by Andrew J. Torget from UNT and Jon Christensen from Stanford – spent the last 18 months developing new methods for finding and analyzing vocabulary patterns in massive collections of historical newspapers.
When a visitor to the project’s website clicks on "Modern Texas," a map of the state appears with a visualization showing the quantity and location of digitized newspapers available for analysis. A box also lists the top 10 topics discussed in the newspapers during that time span.
Government, politics and business make an appearance, but the list is dominated by sports, family and church. A quick look through this history reveals that coverage of sports elbows its way into the top 10 in the early 20th century.
In an era when historical newspapers are being digitized at an astonishing rate, the ability to extrapolate such meaningful patterns with a basic text search simply isn’t feasible. The primary goal of the project, explained Torget, "was to find new ways for people to make sense of the overwhelming abundance of information being made available in the digital age."
As Christensen, executive director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West said, "One of the biggest problems in the humanities, and the digital humanities especially, is too much information."
The largest potential impact of the project is that it allows humanities scholars to efficiently identify evidence of societal trends without the burden of sorting through hundreds of search results. With the power to track the news priorities of large populations of people, the academic implications are significant.
For example, in the period between 1845 and 1861, after Texas went from being an independent republic to a state before the Civil War, 38 newspapers across Texas were dominated by discussion of politics, cotton markets and the fate of the Union, as evidenced by the frequent appearance of the words Texas, county, land, law and sale. Family terms, including wife, children and love, are also among the top 10 most popular news topics of the day.
The computer-generated graphical representations of text correlations will yield new interpretations of historical and literary ideas. Christensen, a history scholar, describes Mapping Texts as "a way of discovering new evidence that we haven’t seen before that may change our view of history." There is evidence in these language patterns, for instance, suggesting that Texans began regularly commemorating the Battle of San Jacinto, the final fight in the Texas Revolution of 1836, soon after the Civil War, long before the early 20th century, the period when most historians thought the commemorations began.
The source material was taken from the Texas Digital Newspaper Program at the University of North Texas Library.
Visitors to the Mapping Texts website can delve into the data through two different interactive visualizations.
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