Abstract
Early modern printed gazettes relied on a system of news exchange and text reuse largely based on handwritten sources. The reconstruction of this information exchange system is possible by detecting reused texts. We present a method to individuate text borrowings within noisy OCRed texts from printed gazettes based on string kernels and local text alignment. We apply our methods on a corpus of Italian gazettes for the year 1648. Beside unveiling substantial overlaps in news sources, we are able to assess the editorial policy of different gazettes and account for a multi-faceted system of text reuse.
The author would like to acknowledge the financial support of Ca’ Foscari University of Venice for the digitisation of the sources required for this study.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Dooley, B. (ed.): The Dissemination of News and the Emergence of Contemporaneity in Early Modern Europe. Ashgate, Farnham (2010)
Dooley, B.: International news flows in the Seventeenth Century – problems and prospects. In: News and the Shape of Europe, 1500-1750 Conference, London (2013)
Fu, Y.: Kernel methods and applications in bioinformatics. In: Springer Handbook in Bioinformatics, Springer, Heidelberg (2014)
Garcia, J.-B., Glaudes, P., Del Lungo, A.: Automatic detection of reuses and citations in literary texts. LLC 29(3), 412–421 (2014)
Hardie, A., McEnery, T., Songlin, P.S.: Historical text mining and corpus-based approaches to the newsbooks of the commonwealth. In: [1]
Infelise, M.: Prima dei giornali: Alle origini della pubblica informazione. Laterza, Bari (2002)
Leslie, C., Kuang, R.: Fast string kernels using inexact matching for protein sequences. JMLR 5, 1435–1455 (2004)
Lodhi, H., Saunders, C., Shawe-Taylor, J., Cristianini, N., Watkins, C.: Text classification using string kernels. JMLR 2, 419–444 (2002)
Piao, S.L., McEnery, T.: A tool for text comparison. In: Proceedings of the Corpus Linguistics 2003 Conference, pp. 637–646 (2003)
Raymond, J.: Newspapers: a national or international phenomenon? Media History 18(3–4), 249–257 (2012)
Seo, J., Bruce Croft, W.: Local text reuse detection. In: SIGIR, Singapore (2008)
Slauter, W.: The paragraph as information technology: how news travelled in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Annales HSS 67(2), 253–278 (2012)
Smith, D.A., Cordell, R., Maddock Dillon, E.: Infectious texts: modeling text reuse in nineteenth-century newspapers. In: 2013 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, pp. 86–94 (2013)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Colavizza, G., Infelise, M., Kaplan, F. (2015). Mapping the Early Modern News Flow: An Enquiry by Robust Text Reuse Detection. In: Aiello, L., McFarland, D. (eds) Social Informatics. SocInfo 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8852. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15168-7_31
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15168-7_31
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-15167-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-15168-7
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)