Much like the transformations currently underway in the digital age, the readership of eighteenth-century Spectator periodicals experienced a genuine revolution in media and communication. Not only were communication technologies refined – including the printing press and its attendant physical and institutional infrastructure – but the very modes of communication within periodical literature underwent profound change. The amicable and direct exchange between readership and (predominantly male) authors, the foregrounding of themes drawn from every day and private life, and the explicit inclusion of a female readership were all genuinely novel features that provoked controversy among both advocates and detractors of this emerging journalistic genre. Today, digital technologies offer an extensive range of new possibilities for researching, archiving, representing, reading, and analyzing the literature and press that emerged from this revolutionary historical period.This article traces the development of our research approaches to the spectatorial genre in relation to the digital technologies employed in our work. We first describe the digital edition of the spectators in the Romance languages, developed by Ertler et al. (2011–2021) in accordance with the standards of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). We then summarize our experience within the DiSpecs research project (Distant Spectators: Distant Reading for Periodicals of the Enlightenment, Scholger et al., 2019–2021), devoted to the application and development of distant reading methods as applied to the corpus of Spanish, French, and Italian spectators. We briefly present the potential of the four methods deployed in this project – sentiment analysis, stylometry, network analysis, and topic modeling – as well as the methodological challenges encountered when working with historical and literary texts. Finally, we describe a new research approach developed on the basis of the findings of these two projects, designed to investigate the transition from the Spectator periodicals to the Spanish epistolary novel – a long-standing desideratum of literary scholarship.
This article provides a vision of what Mexico City was and the life of its inhabitants a few years after the War of Independence based on two important newspapers by José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi. The intention is to explore how the journalist draws a critical map to denounce the adverse situation of the less favored sectors due to the lack of the necessary conditions to integrate them into a modern productive machinery, and not to consider them the only actors that prevent the proper development of a social and economic problem shared.
The system of publication of advertisements and news devised by Nipho in 1758 with the Diario noticioso, curioso-erudito y comercial público, económico revolutionized urban communication by offering a complementary informative space to the posters that covered the street corners to give notice of sales, services, products and novelties in everything that could be useful to the civil and social commerce of the people. Although historically relegated to the background, these advertisements constitute a source of great wealth to recover the daily life in the city during the second half of the eighteenth century, as well as to map its spaces through the use of Historical Geographic Information Systems (HGIS), an analysis tool that opens the door to formulate new research questions and hypotheses.
In Spain, the first Asociaciones de Vecinos (AAVV) emerged in the 1960s. At that time, many Spanish cities’ peripheral districts were characterized by their lake of material equipment. Since then, the members of social movements of AAVV have constantly been changing their strategies to defend these urban spaces threatened by various urban projects. Among the many strategies that the neighbors implemented in both associations of Barceloneta and Cabanyal (Valencia), one permanent feature can be highlighted: the publication of reviews. This is why this article intends to question the reviews of these AAVV, which are entitled Quart de Casa and Butlletí de la Associació de veïns del Cabanyal-Canyamelar. It is about analyzing them in their thematic dimension, through the prism of the sociopolitical context, marked by strong changes and crises, in order to grasp the meaning of the multiple demands they contain.
The textual treatment of historical newspapers such as the Diario de Madrid, accessible from the Biblioteca Nacional de España (BNE), requires historians, linguists and computer scientists to plan their tasks and work in a coordinated manner to cover the research of historians. The technical approach used is framed in Natural Language Processing (NLP), a sub-area of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and experiments are also carried out with modern AI, the so-called Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), which at that time caused a profound change and a significant challenge. The steps carried out to (1) automatically transcribe historical texts from a learned model will be shown, as well as two main tasks, (2) the annotation of entities different from those included in most current systems (people, organizations, locations, products, etc.) and (3) the generation of a training corpus with the support of the GenAI, for the simplification of historical texts. All results are openly available or can be requested from the authors.
