Explaining Geographical Variations in English Rural Infant Mortality Decline Using Place-Centered Reading

What is it about?

We demonstrate that searching an online newspaper archive by placename plus topic allows meaningful conclusions to be drawn about what the paper was saying when it mentioned the place. Three districts in nineteenth-century Suffolk are compared. We suggest that the poor quality of local government in one of them was a cause of higher infant mortality, based on a count of press reports. Our later work at Lancaster develops this approach by putting the target text into a corpus and using corpus linguistic tools to analyse it.

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Why is it important?

Data about the factors influencing nineteenth century mortality is relatively hard to find: important topics like the quality of sanitation are not covered well by quantitative data sets. We show that the analysis of digitised text, in this case newspapers, offers an alternative way in.