Data Challenge:
19th-century Spiritualist Newspapers

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- Concept -

To meet the needs of Data Host National Library of Scotland, in 2021 my team and I created a prototype interactive website for a "19th century spiritualist
newspaper". Our dataset is complete run of ‘The Spiritualist’, later ‘The Spiritualist Newspaper’, and a partial run of its short-lived successor ‘Psyche’ from 1869 to 1882, hold by the National Library of Scotland, textual type, consisting of 416 plain text files, 11,577,467 words (the whole content of newspaper); 416 METS files; 6,365 image files.

- Background -

The development of spiritualist newspaper

Published in London from 1869-1882, ‘The Spiritualist’ is a key title of the Spiritualist movement, and significant in relation to the development of the movement in the UK. Unusual for the Victorian era, the Spiritualist movement emphasized the superiority of women in the field of mediumship and other- wise ‘spiritual’ careers and may have positively contributed to changing attitudes towards the scope of women’s roles in society.

Spiritualism started in New York in 1848 arriving in Britain in the 1850s. With no central structure or key texts, journals played an important role in the movement and helped spread new and radical ideas.

The development of spiritualist movement

Spiritualism is a new religious movement based on the belief that the spirits of the dead exist and have both the ability and the inclination to com- municate with the living.^[1] It became a fad throughout America and Europe during the 1850s. The afterlife, or the "spirit world", is seen by spiritualists, not as a static place, but as one in which spirits continue to evolve. These two beliefs—that contact with spirits is possible, and that spirits are more ad- vanced than humans—lead spiritualists to a third belief: that spirits are capable of providing useful knowledge about moral and ethical issues, as well as about the nature of God.

It attaining cohesion through periodicals, tours by trance lecturers, camp meetings, and the missionary activities of accomplished mediums. Many promi- nent spiritualists were women, and like most spiritualists, supported causes such as the abolition of slavery and women's suffrage.^[2]

_{[1] McCarthy, Erin (October 23, 2012). "Silencing the Dead: The Decline of Spiritualism". The Atlantic.
[2] Braude, Ann (2001). Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America, Second Edition.
Indiana University Press. p. 296. ISBN 978-0-253-21502-4.}

Digitalisation

In 2019, National Library of Scotland decided to digitise the entire collection of the journal and make it available to the public. In 2021, the National Library of Scotland hopes to take "digital humanism" as the entry point, apply "data science" to humanities research, and attract a wider public to participate in the cultural communication of the library.

- Data Analysis -

During the development of our project, we faced challenges: due to the age of the newspaper photocopy image data is damaged, text recognition contains a lot of garbled characters and misspellings. Therefore, in the data analysis phase, "data cleaning" and NLP (Natural Language Processing) is very crutial.

We firstly created an entity category focus on location (cities, countries), and use NER(Named-entity recognition) to detect and extract all the city names from all text files and categorize them. After that we did value counts based on year divisions. Then, we use ‘concordance’, an algorithm which can extract contextual information around a specific word query in a corpus of texts. This context is provided in the form of some text around a specific query. However, this text is limited - it has a fixed size, e.g., number of characters or lines. We hence updated the algorithm to extract full sentences around a specific query and not just the information in the immediate vicinity of a word.

- Interaction Design -

Goal
To arouse public interest, to be functional, easy to read, easy to store, and to be attractive.

Media
Interactive website / Digital newspape

Components
1. Background introduction of 19th century Spiritualist movement - Simulate newspaper style, users can freely put collage newspaper illustrations.

2. Artistic data visualizations - The paper mentions holistic, data-driven visualizations of cities and events that draw viewers into this history.

3. Functional Data visualization - See the global expansion of the occult newspaper over time based on the depth of color and area on the Earth model. All the cities mentioned in the newspaper will be shown on the map. If you click on a lit city, you will see all the selected newspaper texts about that city.

- Outcome -

- Credit -

Data Analysis: Root Cai; Jiarong Yu
Data Processing: Tian Breznik; Root Cai
Web Design: Ellanor Schiltz
Web Development: Tian Breznik
Animation Design: Root Cai
Sketching: Dailin Ye
Partnership Management: Jiarong Yu

Soundtrack: AGATSUMA SOUBI - Jiarong Yu(6Liè); RIPGLOSS

JIARONG YU

JIARONG YU

Data Challenge:
19th-century Spiritualist Newspapers

︎︎︎

- Concept -

- Background -

- Data Analysis -

- Interaction Design -

- Outcome -

- Credit -

︎︎︎ Back

JIARONG YU

JIARONG YU

Data Challenge: 19th-century Spiritualist Newspapers

︎︎︎

- Concept -

- Background -

- Data Analysis -

- Interaction Design -

- Outcome -

- Credit -

︎︎︎ Back

Data Challenge:
19th-century Spiritualist Newspapers