Electronic Text Analysis and Nineteenth-Century Newspapers: TokenX and the RichmondDaily Dispatch

Abstract

����� ��� Early in Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History, Franco Moretti asks, “What would happen if literary historians, too, decided to ‘shift their gaze’ . . . ‘from the extraordinary to the everyday, from exceptional events to the large mass of facts’? What literature would we find, in ‘the large mass of facts’?” (3). Although Moretti considers these questions in relation to the European novel, they are intriguing ones to ask in regard to other textual forms and genres as well. For the literary historian, what is more everyday—literally, figuratively—than the daily newspaper, where, in the nineteenth century, poetry and fiction existed alongside news ar ticles, advertisements, editorials, and an array of other texts, including death and marriage announcements, weather reports, and public notices? Poems could tell the news, and sometimes the news was fiction; genres blurred. When posed of newspapers and their literature, then, Moretti’s question—“What literature would we find, in ‘the large mass of facts’?”— takes on additional nuance. By and large, literary historians have not turned their gaze to the newspaper, and the number of literary scholars treating the nineteenthcentury newspaper in any of its varied incarnations (daily, weekly, local, national, illustrated, story, religious, political, ethnic, multilingual, and so on) is small. Several factors have kept attention focused elsewhere, among them long-prevalent models of literary scholarship, which have tended to privilege authors, forms, and genres not represented in nineteenth-century newspapers. Difficulties in gaining access to the materials, whether print originals or facsimiles, have hindered research. And when you find them, the sheer abundance of their text is daunting. Recently, however, newspapers have appeared in a variety of contexts in American literary studies. Scholars have turned to newspapers in projects on women writers, reader response and reception, fiction in late-nineteenth-century papers, and the