Abstract

The digital collections of newspapers have given rise to a growing interest in studying them with computational methods. This article contributes to this discussion by presenting a method for detecting text reuse in a large corpus of digitized texts. Empirically, the article is based on the corpus of newspapers and journals from the collection of the National Library of Finland. Often, digitized repositories offer only partial views of what actually was published in printed form. The Finnish collection is unique, however, since it covers all published issues up to the year 1920. This article has a two-fold objective: methodologically, it explores how computational methods can be developed so that text reuse can be effectively identified; empirically, the article concentrates on how the circulation of texts developed in Finland from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century and what this reveals about the transformation of public discourse in Finland. According to our results, the reuse of texts was an integral part of the press throughout the studied period, which, on the other hand, was part of a wider transnational practice.

摘要

报纸的数字收藏越来越引起人们对使用计算方法进行研究的兴趣。本文通过提出一种用于检测大量数字化文本中的文本重用的方法，为此次讨论做出了贡献。根据经验，该文章基于芬兰国家图书馆藏书的报纸和期刊的语料库。通常，数字化存储库仅提供实际以印刷形式发布的内容的部分视图。但是，芬兰语收藏是唯一的，因为它涵盖了1920年之前的所有已出版问题。本文有两个目标：方法论上，它探讨了如何开发计算方法，以便可以有效地识别文本重用；根据经验，这篇文章集中讨论了从18世纪末到20世纪初芬兰如何传播文本，以及这揭示了芬兰公共话语的转变。根据我们的结果，在整个研究期间，文本的重复使用是新闻界不可或缺的一部分，另一方面，它又是更广泛的跨国实践的一部分。