Digital History Seminar, 19 Jan 2016Dr Tessa Hauswedellt.hauswedell@ucl.ac.uk

European or Imperial Metropolis? Depictions of London in British Newspapers 1870-1900

Historical semantics

Tracking changing meaning of terms over time, space, and across different cultural contexts

Challenge lies in tracking these changing meanings in diachronic corpora.

Background to researchPart of a European funded research project

funded by HERA. ‘Asymmetrical Encounters’ (asymenc.eu) uses

digital tools on 19th and 20th century newspaper corpora to trace questions of transnational influences and role of ‘reference cultures’ in Europe between larger and smaller West European countries.

Sources usedEEBO (Early English Books Online)The Burney Collection: 17th and 18th Century

Newspaper CorpusBritish Newspaper Archive: 19th CenturyPall Mall Gazette (full text archive from 1870-

1900, with thanks to British Library and J. Baker in particular)

Tools and software usedAntconc

CQP (Corpus Query Processor)

UCREL semantic tagset

All devised and maintained by Lancaster University, freely available software

MethodsCollocation Analysis provides insight into

common and frequent contexts within which a word is used.

N-Gram or Cluster Analysis ( also called lexical bundle) provides a sequence of words that form an expression.

Paul Villars, London and its Environs. A picturesque survey of the metropolis and the suburbs, p.5, 1888 Source: British Library Flickr Images

Illustrated London, or, a series of views in the British metropolis and its vicinity, p.157. Source: British Library, Flickr Images

‘Metropolitanism’ as a term to describe the concerted effort in 19th century to reshape relevant European centers into dominant imperial/commercial centers.

‘the only cities that could afford such reshaping were those that benefited from the colonial economy, the metropoles of London, Paris and Vienna. Other colonial capitals, like Amsterdam, Brussels, St. Petersburg, and Berlin, and industrial ports, like New York, would follow along as best they could, but always in the shadow of these three metropolises’ (Rotenberg, ‘Metropolitanism and the transformation of urban space’, American Anthropologist, 2001, p.9)

Claim that late nineteenth century discourse on London took place within an ‘pan European discourse’.

Necessary to acknowledge the ‘distinctively European dimension to the modern imperial city’.

(Driver and Gilbert, ‘Capital and empire: geographies of imperial London’, Geojournal, (2005) p. 23

Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, December 12 1874, British Newspaper Archive

Pall Mall Gazette, Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon, July 1885

Distribution and dispersion breakdown for ‘metropolis’, Source: EEBO accessed via CQP web processor

Collocations for ‘metropolis’ in EEBO corpus, 1600-1699, Source: EEBO corpus, accessed via the CQPweb processor

Collocations for ‘metropolis’ in EEBO corpus, 1700-1799, Source: EEBO corpus, accessed via the CQPweb processor

Source: 18th Burney Newspapers, accessed via Artemis Primary Sources

Source: 19th century British Newspapers, accessed via Artemis Primary Sources

AntConc Cluster or N-gram

Analysis

Provides contiguous sequence of words that form an expression, can be any x-number of n-grams

Here between 2 and 5 n-grams

Performed separately to the left and to the right (before and after the term) and for each decade separately

Collocation Analysis

Provides terms of words that co-occur frequently

A span of +/- 5 words Collocation control can

include sentence boundaries Calculated on the basis of

Mutual Information Score Performed for each decade

separately

Mutual Information ScoreCommon method to gain insight into actual

strength of the collocationCalculated on the basis of the number of times

two given words occur together versus number of times they occur separately.

The higher the score, the more likely that they are not occurring together by chance.

Can overestimate the score for collocations with very low occurrences (less than 10).

Screenshot, Antconc

Clusters for ‘metropolis’, 1880-1989, PMGZ, arranged by MI score

Collocations for ‘metropolis’, 1890-1899, PMGZ, listed by MI score

UCREL semantic tagset Automated software tool for semantic

annotation of texts Includes 21 major discourse fields with

subdivisions, established as tagset for the semantic analysis of terms in corpus linguistics

Has 98 % lexical coverage for the 19th century, through resources from EEBO as lexica

Error rate of 8.95%

UCREL Semantic Analysis System (USAS)

Source: http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/usas/

Source: http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/usas/semtags.txt

Examples of relevant discourse fields in relation to ‘metropolis’

Frequencies for search terms over period 1870-1899. Source: British Newspaper Archive

Frames for the imperial metropolis In a political context linked to discussions on

the British Empire In a national context relating to relations with

Scotland and or Ireland In relation to architectural schemes and

infrastructure projects In a historical context, as a comparison to cities

of classical antiquity

ConclusionsFrom initially religious to more secular meaning

and increasing usage in public discourse throughout nineteenth century.

In the PMGZ, related to wide field of topical debates, but no evidence of an implied European dimension in relation to the metropolis, but instead to national concerns.

Overall London is presented as a metropolis quite distinct from European counterparts in the late nineteenth century.