The aim of this article is to analyse and compare how technologies of media monitoring have been imagined as seeing devices at two turning points in media history – around 1900 and in the 2000s. The press-cutting agencies that were established during the late nineteenth century, depending on human eyes and scissors, were said to deliver customized news updates, business data and information on public opinion. As seeing devices, they took names such as Argus, Observer and Atlas. These agencies made it possible to see the world on paper. Today, media monitoring depends on automatic processes rather than human eyes. Yet, digital technologies are usually represented by images of old media devices such as magnifying glasses, binoculars, telescopes and watchtowers. These well-known and transparent technologies make the black boxes of digital media seem less strange, but they might also mask the assumptions and complexities that are built into them.
The chapter explores how digital graphs, maps and trees can reveal things never seen before, but how they may also hide all the manual work that lies behind them. The most basic rationale behind digital humanities is the idea that machines should do most of the dull tasks for us. If all the extracting, counting, matching, and plotting is left to computers, researchers can focus on the intellectual parts of the process, interpreting and presenting the results. In many cases, however, digital tools need assistance to work properly. This kind of manual or semi-automatic work may involve compiling, cleaning and filtering datasets, tagging images, transcribing texts, correcting bad matches, adjusting graphs, and so on. Yet, it is rare to see it mentioned when results are presented. The aim of this chapter is to describe and discuss the role of this invisible (semi-)manual work within digital research.
En stor del av innehållet i 1800-talets tidningar utgjordes av material som klippts från andra tidningar, protokoll, utredningar och andra källor. Genom att undersöka saxens plats på tidningsredaktionerna – och hur klipparbetet skilde sig från arbetet med fjäderpenna respektive anteckningsblock – synliggörs ett nedskrivningssystem som definierade nyhetsvärderingar, reglerade vad som var möjligt att uttrycka och rapportera, och vilka platser tidningsmännen kunde besitta på redaktionerna, i världen och i historien. Med saxen reproducerades vad som meddelats av andra. Denna passiva reproduktion osynliggjorde den som klippte och skapade ett underläge i förhållande till skrivande publicister. Att klipparna inte lämnade några spår efter sig i de texter de klippte har också gjort att deras arbete sällan uppmärksammats i historieskrivningen. För att få syn på dem som arbetade med sax måste man gå till skönlitterära och andra skildringar av vardagens redaktionssysslor. Det underläge som saxen skapade och symboliserade kunde samtidigt användas retoriskt för att manifestera yrkestillhörighet och en strategisk maktlöshet i en tid när pressen upplevdes få allt större makt.
Syftet med denna avhandling är att analysera hur den svenska pressens medarbetare representerades i olika medier från 1870-talet till 1930-talet, hur och varför representationerna förändrades, och hur tidningsrnedarbetare förhöll sig till dem. Representationerna av tidningsrnedarbetare i romaner, noveller, film, presshistoriska arbeten, debatter och karikatyrer formade bilden av yrket i offentligheten. De som var verksamma i pressen försökte kontrollera, förändra och använda dessa representationer för att framställa sig själva som legitima och ttovärdiga. Denna sttävan efter kontroll analyseras med hjälp av Erving Goffmans teori om roller. Med begrepp från Pierre Bourdieu undersöks även hur denna sttävan var en del av olika tidningsrnedarbetares försök att etablera ett journalistiskt fält med regler och kapital som stärkte de egna intressena. Avhandlingens huvudargument är att kampen om kontroll och förändring av representationerna å den ena sidan, och strävan att agera i enlighet med allmänna förväntningar på rollen å den andra, var av stor betydelse för journalisttollens och journalistikens formering och etablering. Perspektivet är kulturhistoriskt snarare än professionssociologiskt.
Tidningar, romaner och filmer var arenor där journalistikens regler förhandlades och etablerades. Det som värderades i 1800-talets tidningsvärld var politiska, polemiska och litterära texter, där publicisten gavs utrymme att uttrycka sin personliga ståndpunkt. Underordnade tidningsrnedarbetare hade emellertid inte samma möjligheter att uttrycka och profilera sig. Detta förändrades successivt i 1900-talets början. Tidningarna i massupplaga försökte nu locka läsare med sensationella nyheter, stora rubriker och bilder på förstasidan. Journalisternas uppgift blev att leverera de nyheter som tidningsköparna ville läsa om. Denna marknadslogik blev samtidigt en del av det journalistiska fältets regler. Att hitta och rapportera stora nyheter var ett sätt att utmärka sig och bli erkänd som en riktig journalist som behärskade rollen.
The first collection is the diary of Allan Holmström, a private collector, which documents everyday events from the 1870s to the 19 6 0s. Because Holmström added clippings and notes to his diary throughout his life, the diary became an ongoing project of reconstruction of memories rather than an account of how Holmström first experienced events. The second collection is an archive of newspaper clippings founded in 1917 by the Christian foundation Sigtunastiftelsen. The foundation aimed to collect articles about major issues but was not interested in everyday ephemeral news. Thus, this way of collecting reproduced a hierarchy of texts. The third collection is a series of printed volumes of newspaper clippings edited and published as ”filmbooks” by Erik Lindorm. He believed that his volumes allowed history to ”speak with its own voice”. The clippings and the pages look authentic, with the original columns and spelling retained, but some of the clippings were clearly edited to make the collections – and history – more accessible to modern newspaper readers.
Collections of newspaper clippings provide a record of the past but are themselves historical products. Different collections are part of different traditions and are used in different contexts, which determine what kind of history they store and transmit. An examination of how these collections once constructed the memory of the past can provide a critical perspective on how the archives of today keep a record of the present.
News reporters have been frequent travellers during the latest hundred and fifty years. The aim of this article is to analyse how some wellknown American and Swedish reporters have constructed and represented their identity as travelling reporters in their own writings and how they have been represented by others. The reporters discussed are Henry Stanley, Nellie Bly, Mauritz Rubenson, Ida Bäckmann, Tora Garm, Knut Stubbendorff, and Barbro Alving. These reporters often represented themselves as heroic adventurers; much like explorers, knights and detectives. The reporter stories are seen as parts of the construction of a specific reporter-identity. The formation of the reporter identity can be seen as a dialectic process where representations of the reporter and fictional characters tend to influence and run into each other. One interesting example is the Swedish author and journalist Knut Stubbendorff’s novel Den flygande (1928), about a news reporter in Stockholm; and the autobiographical Ishavsreportaget (1928) about his own adventures as a reporter. The journalistic character in these books, fictional or real, are described and presented in much the same way, as a hero on an endless news hunt with only one direction – to get the big scoop. My point here is that these narratives and representations must be analysed seriously, instead of being rejected as fake images that don’t tell us anything about the real life of working reporters. The stories of the heroic reporters show that the biggest news that these reporters deliver was often the news about their own adventures. Drawing from studies in public science, the self-representations of the reporters can be seen as an important part of what makes media reports legitimate and trustworthy.
Computers and mobile phones are piling up in archives, libraries, and museums. What kind of objects are they, what can they tell us, and how can we approach them? The aim of this chapter is to exemplify what an investigation of a hard drive implicates, the methods needed to conduct it, and what kind of results we can get out of it. To focus the investigation, hard drives are approached as records of everyday media use. The chapter introduces a computer forensic method used as a media ethnographic tool. Computer forensics and media ethnography are rooted in different methodological traditions, but both take an interest in people’s routines and the way they do and organize things. The chapter argues that a hard drive represents a window into the history of new media: into time specific software, formats, and media use.
I detta paper undersöks hur celebriteterna på offentlighetens scen lever vidare, omvandlas och används av en som sitter i publiken. Utgångspunkten är Allan Holmström och hans årskrönikor som finns bevarade i Nordiska museets arkiv. Holmström (1871–1963) var kontorist i Södertälje, vän av opera och idrott och en hängiven tidningsläsare. Men Holmström skapade också egna tidningar. I flerhundrasidiga årskrönikor förde han protokoll över det offentliga livet åren kring sekelskiftet. Här skildrade han kungligheter, politiker, operastjärnor, författare och idrottsmän i inklistrade bilder och handskrivna artiklar, signerade ”Allan”. Holmströms krönikor ger en överblick över celebriteterna på tidens mediescen, men också inblick i hur en enskild person levde med i det offentliga genom att göra det till en del av det privata.
This article examines the changing journalistic norms and roles in terms of mobile and sedentary news work at the end of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The analysis draws on the research into the small everyday tools of bureaucracy and science. The focus is on the quill, the scissors and paste pot, the body of the reporter and the computer. Journalistic neutrality and truth seem at any given time to be defined in line with the practices made possible by the available tools. A change in tools makes new practices possible, meaning that the norms have to be redefined. Journalism was once synonymous with mobile reporters reporting on events they themselves witnessed. Journalism today, however, is often sedentary copy-and-paste work, much resembling the scissors-and-paste journalism of the nineteenth century. Comparison reveals that such transmission of texts and images produced by someone else always runs the risk of reproducing the voices of the elites.
This article is tracing a newspaper poem, originally published in 1795 in the section for lost and found, and reprinted repeatedly in newspapers in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The poem describes a girl who has lost a pouch with her sewing kit on a walk through Stockholm. The one who returns it is promised two sugar breads and a kiss as a reward. It was published anonymously but Anna Maria Lenngren was later identified as the author. Following the poem from paper to paper reveals a network of text reuse where texts were borrowed, edited and recontextualized. Several papers all around Sweden published the verse as an anonymous advertisement from 1837 to 1868. Yet, among other things, the editors also changed the place name mentioned in the poem to make it seem as if it was written by a local girl. Another version of the text was widely circulated in papers from 1887 to 1917. This version was truer to the original wording of the poem, but it was published along with an anecdote identifying Lenngren herself as the girl in the text, making it part of her own marriage proposal. This time the poem was placed in the section for humorous titbits, among gossip and funny stories. The different versions of the poem illustrate how newspapers could function as a medium for literature in the nineteenth century. The practice of text reuse had the potential of maximizing the readership but could also mean that authors lost control over their words. When poems became “fugitive verses” in the network of newspapers, they entered a fluid state where authorships were destabilized and texts were recontextualized to fit on the newspaper page.
The digitization of historical records not only creates new research opportunities but also challenges. Documents may be searched online and digital tools may be used for finding patterns in large datasets. Yet, the quality of digitized material is often low and it may be difficult for researchers to evaluate this material when hidden behind interfaces. My aim in this article is to explore a digitized newspaper and the associated problems and opportunities. My exploration is guided by the following question: What was written about the electrical telegraph in Aftonbladet in the 1830s, 1840s and 1850s? The files of the digitized Aftonbladet for the years 1830-1862 contain massive amounts of corrupted words generated by the OCR engine. Another problem is that the tool used for auto-segmentation has merged separate text items into single text blocks and split long texts into smaller parts. The digitization process is not a neutral text transfer from one medium to another, it is a process generating new texts never printed in the original newspaper. In order to find as many (corrupted) versions of the words "electrical" and "telegraph" as possible, the text files were searched with a Levhinstein distance of two (allowing for two letters to be added, replaced or missing). The words that were found were used as search words to identify texts blocks reporting on the electrical telegraph. To find themes in the texts, a co-occurrence search was carried out, identifying clusters of words frequently co-occurring. Previous research has focused on utopian ideas associated with this technology and the telegraph as an immaterial form of communication obliterating physical space. The clusters identified in the digital analysis suggest that more mundane topics dominated the newspaper: the electrical telegraph was described as a material form of communication controlled by bureaucracy, depending on and emphasizing geographical conditions. Digital databases make new research possible, but the low quality of digitized texts results in uncertainties concerning the results. Researchers using these databases need to be aware of the digital forms and interfaces regulating research practices.
This article describes and analyses foodways and media in everyday life, through collections of recipes and media material in private manuscript cookbooks. The research is based on about 200 private manuscript cookbooks from the south of Sweden, created from the late 19th century to the middle of the 20th century. This period saw great changes in foodways as well as media use. Many people moved from the countryside to the cities, new technologies were introduced in the food industry as well as in private kitchens and new ingredients and dishes were imported. Newspapers and weeklies became guides in this new world of food, and the recipes in manuscript cookbooks were often collected from the papers.
The article shows that early cookbooks were compilations of recipes from the collector’s social networks of family, friends and neighbours. Gradually the sources of the recipes shifted from social networks to media. Recipes in the cookbooks from the 20th century were often cut or copied from papers or taken from radio or television. These recipes introduced new ingredients and foreign dishes, but also traditional everyday recipes and basic kitchen tasks. Recipes from the media helped the collectors to adopt new ways of cooking, but also cooking in its most basic form, e.g. how to fry. The collecting women did not learn as much from their mothers and social network, they got their recipes and skills from papers and published cookbooks.
DESKS ARE CENTRAL NODES IN OUR MODERN SOCIETY. Office employees spend many of their working hours behind desks. School children doing homework sit at them, as do authors writing fiction. Countries are governed and corporations are controlled by people behind desks. Those of us working from the couch do not escape them, since they are remediated in the graphical user interface on our computers. Most research is the product of desk work, but little scholarly attention has been paid to the desks themselves.
This book presents new perspectives on changing ideals and practices surrounding desks and desk work in offices, homes, and in popular culture. The authors represent a broad range of interests and disciplines: business administration, cultural studies, library and information science, literary studies, media and communication studies, media history, and social work. They have all been encouraged to ask new questions about familiar contexts and topics: What is the role of the desk in the daily lives of social workers? What difference does it make that most traders on the financial markets have moved from trading floors to desks where movements and transactions are visible on screens? Why are so many talk show hosts sitting behind desks? And what happens when the desks are left for other arrangements?
Does media history really start with a bang? 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.
Idag upplever många att medier genomsyrar allt fler delar av vardag och samhälle. Men vår samtid delar denna erfarenhet med människor som levt under tidigare perioder. För att hitta en tid då medier inte satte sin prägel på liv och samhälle måste vi gå mycket långt tillbaka i historien. Mediehistoriska perspektiv kan anläggas på de flesta historiska fenomen. Det förflutna är nämligen endast tillgängligt i medierad form – om det så gäller antikt klotter, runstenar, dammiga arkiv dokument, sönderfallande tidningslägg, muntliga berättelser eller förra årets Youtubeklipp. I Mediernas historia. Från big bang till big data skildras en mycket lång mediehistoria. Att mäta medievanor genom big data är idag vanligt – men även urknallen big bang är ett medialt fenomen vars kosmiska bakgrundsstrålning inte kan studeras utan att först registreras. Med en disposition i 44 avsnitt betonar boken olika mediekulturers särprägel, samtidigt som den lyfter fram hur ett myller av medier har interagerat – från beständiga lertavlor över predikstolar och tidigmodern visuell kommunikation till strömmande medier. Istället för att framhäva mediehistoriska brott och revolutioner synlig gör boken kontinuiteter ifråga om hur medier har etablerats, använts och förändrats fram till vår egen tid. Relationen mellan vår samtids sociala medier och traditionella mass medier utgör här endast ett exempel på den komplexa väv av sinsemellan hopflätade kommunikationsformer som historien består av.
Based on digital readings of all records from the Swedish parliament1867–2019, we examine how the concept ‘propaganda’ was used in the debates. To track the concept, we have extracted word window co-occurrences, bigrams, and keywords. Research on the history of propaganda in liberal democracies has emphasized that the meaning of the concept was open-ended before WWI. By 1945, it had been contaminated by authoritarian propaganda, and its negative connotations were cemented at least by the 1960s. Our analysis, however, shows that 'propaganda' was used mainly in a negative sense from 1867 to 2019. Nevertheless, it was also possible to use 'propaganda 'in a positive and neutral sense between the 1910s and 1980s. We suggest that a period of deideologization in Sweden post-WWII made it possible to use 'propaganda' as long as the issues were seen as non-controversial. The radicalization in the late-1960s meant that authorities and previously non-controversial issues became contested. To suggest one-directional 'propaganda' in order to implement what politicians had decided was in people's best interest became difficult int his context. In this new communication setting, 'information' was a more flexible term in contexts where ‘propaganda’ had previously been used in a neutral or positive sense.
In this article, we investigate traces of a news media logic in the Swedish parliamentary speeches from 1920 to 2019. Drawing on theories of mediatisation, we examine two aspects: the length of the speeches and repeated political slogans. Our analysis is based on a complete corpus of parliamentary records with annotated speeches. Speech length was measured based on word count, and the identification of slogans was based on repeated seven-word segments, filtered to exclude generic phrases. While it is difficult to draw any definitive conclusions about the influence of an external media logic, the speech length has dropped by 50 per cent since 1920. This change relates to new parliamentary procedures, and from the 1980s, with the explicit goal to attract the news media. Short and snappy political slogans have increased significantly since the 1990s. This development reflects previous research stating that sound bites are getting shorter.
This paper explores the contexts of the keywords "propaganda", "information" and "upplysning" in the Swedish parliamentary debate protocols, from 1920 to 2019. The digitized protocols have recently been annotated with metadata for speakers’ gender and party affiliation. Based on perspectives developed within conceptual history, we have traced the concepts in the parliamentary debates and used computational methods to cluster the contexts in which they occur. Word windows around the three keywords were compiled into a subcorpus, and topic modelling was used to cluster the contexts. The findings show that the distribution of the topics gets more even over time, partly explained by the spread of the term "information" in various political areas in the mid-20th century. Furthermore, the only distinct topic shared between the three keywords relates to campaigns to limit and prevent the consumption of alcohol, narcotics and tobacco. While a conceptual shift takes place within this topic, from "upplysning" to "information", it is also shown that it was possible to discuss and frame these issues in terms of "propaganda" post-WWII – it even became more common to do so in the 1950s and 1960s.
In the first years of the twentieth century, numerous attempts were made at powered flight. What is commonly labelled 'the pioneer era' (1900-1914) covers the unsteady beginnings of the motorized airplane as well as its large-scale introduction in warfare and for the transportation of goods and passengers. Initially regarded as a foolish toy for hazardous adventure, the airplane rapidly became a favoured symbol of modernity, and the engineers, pilots, and entrepreneurs involved were celebrated as the heroes of progress. However, the quick change in opinion regarding the use and benefit of airplanes was not only prompted by the technical skill of the inventors or the bravery of the flyers. The aim of this paper is to shed light on the media history of early aviation, including the celebrity pilot as an important means by which aviation was publicly experienced and popularized. Through a case study of the mediatization of the first Swedish aviator, Carl Cederstrom (1867-1918), the article explores the interplay of the press, other kinds of media, and advertising in the introduction of the motorized airplane in Sweden in around 1910. At this time, air shows and competitions were being arranged all over the world. The media coverage was massive, and the aviators were frequently interviewed and celebrated. The press, however, did not only report on the events. By offering prizes and arranging competitions, individual newspapers played an active role in the introduction of powered flight. When the Stockholm Air Show was held in 1910 and 1911, one of the Stockholm dailies, Dagens Nyheter, was among the main organizers. The relation between the air show and the press coverage can be interpreted in terms of a feedback loop: the reporting drew attention to the show; the show became a mass attraction; and the papers reported it even more. At the centre of attention was always the aviator Cederstrom himself, popularly known as 'The Flying Baron'. The status of this persona and the participation of the press, the cinema, and postcard publishers also made the air shows attractive for sponsors such as champagne houses, patent medicine companies, and manufacturers of fire equipment. It was this joint attention that quickly transformed a limited concern into national awareness. When the Swedish armed forces in 1912 sought funding for its first aircraft, the politicians were easily convinced of the benefits of aviation.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore and analyze the digitized newspaper collection at the National Library of Sweden, focusing on cultural heritage as digital noise. In what specific ways are newspapers transformed in the digitization process? If the digitized document is not the same as the source document – is it still a historical record, or is it transformed into something else?
Design/methodology/approach
The authors have analyzed the XML files from Aftonbladet 1830 to 1862. The most frequent newspaper words not matching a high-quality references corpus were selected to zoom in on the noisiest part of the paper. The variety of the interpretations generated by optical character recognition (OCR) was examined, as well as texts generated by auto-segmentation. The authors have made a limited ethnographic study of the digitization process.
Findings
The research shows that the digital collection of Aftonbladet contains extreme amounts of noise: millions of misinterpreted words generated by OCR, and millions of texts re-edited by the auto-segmentation tool. How the tools work is mostly unknown to the staff involved in the digitization process? Sticking to any idea of a provenance chain is hence impossible, since many steps have been outsourced to unknown factors affecting the source document.
Originality/value
The detail examination of digitally transformed newspapers is valuable to scholars depending on newspaper databases in their research. The paper also highlights the fact that libraries outsourcing digitization processes run the risk of losing control over the quality of their collections.
This article highlights the media historical possibilities to analyse linguistic patterns in massive amounts of texts using digital methods. Our starting point is the fact that The National Library of Sweden has made over 12 million newspaper pages available in digital format. An important question is how to research them. The article presents a media history of the Swedish newspaper digitisation, as well as new ways of conducting historical newspaper research using digital methods. A case study is presented where the conceptualisation of a new media technology (the internet) in newspapers from the 1990s is tracked with a digital tool searching for word co-occurrences. The possibilities of digital methods are often incredible, but we should not underestimate the problematic aspects of using digital tools to explore digitised newspapers. The poor quality of the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is described as one of the major challenges facing historical newspaper research in a digital environment
What a politician says in the parliament is not always what gets printed. In turning spoken words into printed records, the language changes, often towards formalization. The stenographers play a key role in this linguistic transformation. Their job is to align oral speeches with linguistic norms and parliamentary nomenclature. In this context, the formulaic trumps the personal. In our paper, we target these formulaic transformations, which we call the stenographic bias. Our analytical work is guided by the following research questions: In what ways are the printed records shaped by the stenographic bias? And what mechanisms are part of shaping this bias?
The paper is empirically based on stenographic guidelines defining language norms and procedural rules, primarily from the 1980s and 2020s, as well as supplemented parliamentary material. To study the formulaic language over time and how language norms and rules affected the printed debate records on the aggregated level, we make use of a recent annotated dataset of Swedish parliamentary speeches from 1920 to 2020. By combining close reading and distant reading we aim to identify and discuss cases and phrases that shed light on the way stenographic norms and procedures have influenced parliamentarians’ speeches as they are recorded in the protocols.