Pollmann T, Baayen RH "Computing historical consciousness. A quantitative inquiry into the presence of the past in newspaper texts"COMPUTERS AND THE HUMANITIES 35 (3): 237-253 AUG 2001

[Eugene Garfield]

Thijs Pollmann    : thijs.pollmann at let.uu.nl
R.Harald Baayen   : baayen at mpi.nl


TITLE    :        Computing historical consciousness. A quantitative inquiry
into the presence of the past in newspaper texts
AUTHORS:     Pollmann T, Baayen RH
SOURCE  :     COMPUTERS AND THE HUMANITIES 35 (3): 237-253 AUG 2001

 Document type: Article    Language: English      Cited References: 22
Times Cited: 0


Abstract:
In this paper, some electronically gathered data are presented and analyzed
about the presence of the past in newspaper texts. In ten large text corpora
of six different languages, all dates in the form of years between 1930 and
1990 were counted. For six of these corpora this was done for all the years
between 1200 and 1993. Depicting these frequencies on the timeline, we find
an underlying regularly declining curve, deviations at regular places and
culturally determined peaks at irregular points. These three phenomena are
analyzed.

Mathematically spoken, all the underlying curves have the same form. Whether
a newspaper gives much or little attention to the past, the distribution of
this attention over time turns out to be inversely proportional to the
distance between past and present. It is shown that this distribution is
largely independent of the total number of years in a corpus, the culture in
which it is published, the language and the date of origin of the corpus.
The phenomenon is explained as a kind of forgetting: the larger the distance
between past and present, the more difficult it is to connect something of
the past to an item in the present day. A more detailed analysis of the
data shows a breakpoint in the frequency vs. distance from the publication
date of the texts. References to events older than approximately 50 years
are the result of a forgetting process that is distinctively different from
the forgetting speed of more recent events.

Pandel's classification of the dimensions of historical consciousness is
used to answer the question how these investigations elucidate the
historical consciousness of the cultures in which the newspapers are written
and read.

Addresses:
Pollmann T, Utrecht Inst Linguist OTS, Drift 8, NL-3512 BS Utrecht,
Netherlands
Utrecht Inst Linguist OTS, NL-3512 BS Utrecht, Netherlands
Max Planck Inst Psycholinguist, NL-6525 XD Nijmegen, Netherlands
Univ Nijmegen, Interfac Res Unit Language & Speech, NL-3512 BS Utrecht,
Netherlands

Publisher:
KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBL, DORDRECHT

IDS Number:
448UH

ISSN:
0010-4817