Oct. Digital Event: “From Periodicals to Dailies”
An Update on the Curran Index
In this special RSVP Digital Event, Editors Emily Middleton and Lars Atkin will discuss how the addition of dailies to the Curran Index has afforded new research opportunities and challenges in a talk entitled “From Periodicals to Dailies: Attribution Scholarship and the Joys and Challenges of Archival Plenitude” on Friday, October 17 at 8 a.m. PT / 10 a.m. ET / 4 p.m. UK / 5 p.m. CET. The plenitude of the nineteenth-century newspaper archive challenges our principles of selection, while providing opportunities to “widen” our understanding of the field by continuing to bring out of the shadows journalists whose contribution has long been masked by anonymity.
This talk will highlight data gleaned from an archive of more than 1,000 articles contained in the scrapbooks of journalist, free-thinker and anti-vivisectionist Frances Power Cobbe that has recently been integrated into the Curran Index. The data includes several hundred leader articles for the Liverpool Echo. Using topic modelling and statistical analysis, this talk considers the Cobbe’s position in relation to other journalists of her era:
- Did she write on similar topics to her contemporaries or were her interests particular to her?
- Was her age, gender and class status typical of her “generation” of journalists?
- Was her gender a significant factor in the trajectory of her career?
We will end by considering the significance of attribution scholarship in the twenty-first century, as well as sharing some ideas about how you can contribute to the Curran Index.
