Karin Stahel, PhD candidate in Data Science
The newspapers of 19th-century New Zealand contain a fascinating mix of article types and topics. From stern political commentary to obscure humour, the articles are sometimes surprisingly similar to today’s news and at other times very strange. While digitisation has made these papers more accessible in one sense, it has also added further ‘mutations’ which can create issues for researchers when it comes to discovering and analysing content. In this talk, Karin will share some insights from an exploratory analysis of a corpus of almost 8,000 articles sampled from the National Library of New Zealand’s Papers Past newspaper collection and annotated with 22 article genres such as ‘Letter’, ‘Poetry or verse’, ‘Advice’, and ‘Editorial’. Her analysis applies corpus linguistics methods to explore similarities and differences between the corpus and modern New Zealand English and examines the distinct and overlapping vocabularies of the annotated genres.
Thursday 9 July, 11am – 12pm
Brainbox (Elsie Locke 203)