Organised by Research Area 5: "Building Digital Communities".

Presentation by Ryan Cordell (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign): The Dynamic Networks of 19th-Century Newspaper Reprinting

What was the geography of newspaper texts' circulation in the nineteenth-century United States? Scholars understand that many of the texts—including news, fiction, poetry, information, and more—which circulated through the newspaper exchange system originated in urban publication centers on the east coast, such as New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, and that circulation often followed postal routes, train lines, or (eventually) telegraph wires. But the more granular dynamics of circulation have proven much harder to trace within massive newspaper archives, particularly the movement of texts among smaller urban and rural areas. Even less clear have been the ways that regional texts circulated from their places of origin back toward the metropole. Drawing on aggregated reprinting data from the Viral Texts project (https://viraltexts.org/), this lecture shows how dynamic social network analysis can model the "information cascades" of the nineteenth-century newspaper exchange system, focusing not on the commerce between individual papers but instead on the larger geographic trends of circulation. This talk especially seeks to forefront regional circulation networks that operated outside of or alongside the hub-and-spokes model often assumed by accounts of newspaper exchange and publication. Finally, the talk will show how these aggregate views of information can help us understand, by alignment or contrast, the unique trajectories of specific reprinted newspaper texts.

The presentation will be digitally streamed.
Webex link: https://fu-berlin.webex.com/fu-berlin-en/j.php?MTID=m6be75decbf36ce0ba71e0479c1f0a1c6