To Örebro University

Seasonal and maritime-related variations in newspaper content and circulation speed have been observed in the literature. This study of Swedish conditions 1790–1829 documents such differences. However, its focus is on domestic circulation and its dependence upon, among other things, incoming foreign news. By combining a computer-assisted method that tracks text reuse with close readings, and by breaking down the circulation into genres and categories of duration, historical change in these variations is made visible. While previous research has emphasised the explanatory power of technology, this article shows that more factors must be considered. Although technological infrastructural advancements were very limited, circulation times decreased and seasonal variations were evened out. This is best explained, this article suggests, by the growth of the system itself, by overall policy changes and by the increased scope for individual actors to change the culture and the protocols of the system, whether intentionally or not.

More than just newspapers, television, and social networks, media are the means by which any information is communicated, from cosmic radiation traces to medieval church bells to modern identity documents. Cultures are held together as much by bookkeeping and records as they are by stories and myths. From Big Bang to Big Data is a long history of the media – how it has been established, used, and transformed from the beginning of recorded time until the present. It is not primarily a story of revolutions and innovations, but of continuities and overlaps that reveal surprising patterns across history. Many media were invented as ways to store and share information, and many have served as powerful tools for administration and control. The concerns raised about media today, whether about privacy, piracy, or anxieties over declining cultural standards, preoccupied earlier generations too. In a playful style, accompanied by more than one hundred illustrations, the authors show us how every society has been a media society in its own way. From antique graffiti to last year’s viral YouTube clip, the past is only approachable through media. From Big Bang to Big Data provides a new way of thinking about media in history – and about human societies past and present.

Today shared media content and virality represent significant phenomena, but they are not as unique to our current society as commonly assumed. More than a century before the internet, information circulated within a network of newspapers that borrowed texts from both nearby and distant sources. From the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century, newspapers gradually gained greater significance as a technological medium. However, a fundamental yet often overlooked characteristic of these newspapers was their cut-and-paste nature, which facilitated the widespread dissemination of text items in time and space. This movement occurred at varying speeds, from slow to very rapid.

Within this book, Finnish and Swedish historians focus on shared Swedish-language newspaper texts and formats, exploring the mechanisms through which news, announcements, literary texts, advertisements and other contents were copied and reprinted across the Swedish-language press in Sweden, Finland and Swedish America. Employing a computer-assisted methodology to identify chains of text reuse in over 7.5 million newspaper pages derived from 1629 distinct newspaper titles, this book introduces a comprehensive database of reused texts.It examines the types of content that traversed transnationally and those that remained local. It investigates the asymmetry of communication, the encountered hubs and peripheries, as well as the extent and velocity with which information was disseminated. By combining a digitally enhanced bird’s-eye view with meticulous close readings, this work primarily contributes to the comprehension of cultural relations across the Baltic Sea.

In this paper, we present a database and an interface on text reuse between newspapers and journals published in the Swedish language in Sweden and Finland during the 1645–1918 time frame. Using two national, digital newspaper collections, we detected their textual similarities with a computational method to study the textual migration, i.e., information flows, between the two countries. For purposes of this project, we developed a database of detected clusters of text reuse and an online interface to search, examine and analyse the transnational movement of information. The database, Text Reuse in the Swedish-language Press, 1645–1918, is accessible online and includes texts from over 1,100 newspapers and journals published at approximately 150 locations at various times during the 274-year time frame.

This is a database and an interface with a search engine for searching and analyzing text reuse clusters in the Swedish-language press from 1645 to 1918. It covers material from Finland, Sweden, and also the United States. It has been produced by the project Informationsflöden över Östersjön: Svenskspråkig press som kulturförmedlare 1771–1918 (Information Flows across the Baltic Sea: Swedish-language press as a cultural mediator, 1771–1918). The database was opened online in October 2021.