Infectious texts

Texts propagate through many social networks and provide evidence for their structure. We present efficient algorithms for detecting clusters of reused passages embedded within longer documents in large collections. We apply these techniques to analyzing the culture of reprinting in the United State...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Published:
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/2047/d20004858
Description
Summary:Texts propagate through many social networks and provide evidence for their structure. We present efficient algorithms for detecting clusters of reused passages embedded within longer documents in large collections. We apply these techniques to analyzing the culture of reprinting in the United States before the Civil War. Without substantial copyright enforcement, stories, poems, news, and anecdotes circulated freely among newspapers, magazines, and books. From a collection of OCR’d newspapers, we extract a new corpus of reprinted texts, explore the geographic spread and network connections of different publications, and analyze the time dynamics of different genres.