Philosophy in a 19th Century New Zealand Newspaper Corpus

NZAP 2023

Joshua Wilson Black

Te Kāhui Roro Reo | New Zealand Institute of Language, Brain and Behaviour
Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha | University of Canterbury

Overview

  1. Contextualist history of philosophy
  2. Philosophy in 19th Century New Zealand Newspapers
  3. The corpus
  4. What’s it good for?
    • Large-scale patterns in thought
    • Identification of thinkers
  5. An objection

Contextualist History of Philosophy

Contextualist HoP

We can think of philosophical ‘conversation’ in different ways—literally as actual dialogue, metaphorically as implied discussion through the themes that are treated and arguments which are employed. In philosophical debates in the past, as now, the interchange might be with one’s contemporaries or with one’s predecessors, direct or indirect, personal or impersonal. (Hutton 2014, 936).

If the living practice of philosophy is constituted of conversations of this kind, the history of philosophy might fruitfully be treated as an ongoing conversation—not a one-way conversation between present and past, but a series of conversations in a variety of directions, all located in the past. (Hutton 2014, 936)

Contextualist HoP

  • An upshot: disrupt the standard canon.
  • Hutton’s work deals with many Early Modern women philosophers.
  • Contextualist work can feed in to non-contextualist conversations.
  • Initial impulse: let the past speak.

History of Philosophy in 19th Century New Zealand

Philosophy in 19th Century NZ

  • Histories of academic philosophy in New Zealand find nothing much to say before the middle of the twentieth century.

… many of those who had longstanding chairs published next to nothing (Davies and Helgeby 2014)

The first three professors [at Otago] were interesting — but they were not philosophers of any great distinction (Pigden 2011)

Philosophy in 19th Century NZ

  • There ought to be some philosophical story.
  • Why?
    • (At least) two worlds meeting (Māori response to colonisation)
    • Ideas motivated the form of colonial government (Pākehā utopianism)
    • Desire for self-knowledge
  • Perhaps we need to look outside the academy.

Philosophy in Newspapers

Newspapers were (and are):

  • open to a wider range of voices than academic texts,
  • cheaper to produce than academic texts,
  • reflective of a ‘public sphere’ (get at what ‘the folk’ think),
  • connect philosophical debate with wider social and political issues.

Philosophy in (NZ) Newspapers

…newspapers not only shaped colonial political life, they were also the fundamental infrastructure for intellectual life in colonial Otago. They were venues where books were discussed and debated, ideas were shared and refined, and where colonists developed arguments about the nature of the natural world, human society, the past and the future. (Ballantyne 2011, 57)

…newspapers were ascendant in colonial New Zealand because imported books were expensive and a sustainable local periodical literature was slow to emerge. (Ballantyne 2011, 58)

Source: https://smithcourtstories.org/assets/celebration-of-independence/

The Corpus

Why a Corpus?

  • NZ newspaper database: https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/
  • Keyword search is OK for many purposes!
  • But advanced text analytic techniques applied to large digital newspaper databases provide new opportunities.
  • Both high-level representation and identification of ‘outliers’.

Papers Past Open Data Release

Corpus Construction

  • Problem: applying text analytics to the complete Papers Past Open Data Release isn’t going to tell us much about philosophy.
  • This is a ‘needle in a haystack’ problem.
  • Solution: label items which contain ‘philosophical discourse’ and train a text classifier.
  • Iterative method: use initial classifier to find items to label and improve subsequent classifiers.

Newspaper items with ‘philosophical discourse’ are those which contain claims about, or appeal to, some conception of ultimate value or reality.

  • e.g. an argument for a liberal political outlook on the basis that freedom is the most important value.
  • e.g. the claim that divine revelation is a more reliable source of knowledge than scientific investigation.
  • This is to label a certain kind of content. (Contentiously!)
  • Aside: argumentation is (currently) difficult to detect automatically.

Details

  • Output:
    • A general method for specialist corpus construction in historical newspapers (Wilson Black 2022).
    • A ‘philosophy’ corpus containing 61,000 items extracted from 7.5 million newspaper items.

Details

Details

Using the Corpus

Using the Corpus

Change in topic

An Objection

The Labelling Problem

  • Corpus construction relies on me deciding what counts as philosophy (the labelling stage).
  • Operationalising concepts is always an issue.
  • For contextualist HoP, the past supposed to ‘speak for itself’ here?

Response

  • Corpus work benefits from comparison with other corpora.
  • An alternative corpus: a list of all public lectures and their participants generated from newspaper advertisements.
  • No controversial labelling here!
  • Work with Lera Protasova (RA) and the UC Arts Digital Lab

Identifying public lectures

  • Fine tune a neural network ‘question answering’ model.
    • i.e. give it a series of examples (around 500) of lecture advertisements with the title, participants, and various other bits of information marked.
  • Performance increases with fine tuning.
  • Applied only to Christchurch, so far.

What?

  • Topics picked out in the original corpus are prominent in the lecture titles.
  • In particular, prominence of ‘science/religion’ topics in the original corpus is not a result of labelling bias.
  • We see these topics appear in the wider context of public lecture practices.

Who?

  • Ranking names by frequency.
  • Some highlights:
    • W. W. Collins, head of the Canterbury Freethought Association (top entry, 358 appearances).
    • John Hosking, Methodist minister and debater (90 appearances).
    • Arthur Worthington, founder of the Temple of Truth (60 appearances)
  • Top ranked women:
    • Lottie Wilmot, intersection of Spiritualism and Freethought (28 appearances).
    • Ada Campbell, Freethought lecturer (9 appearances).

Summary

Summary

  1. Contextualist history of philosophy
  2. Philosophy in 19th Century New Zealand Newspapers
  3. The corpus
  4. What’s it good for?
    • Large-scale patterns in thought
    • Identification of thinkers
  5. An objection

References

Ballantyne, Tony. 2011. “Reading the Newspaper in Colonial Otago.” Journal of New Zealand Studies, no. 12: 47–63.
Buck-Morss, Susan. 2009. Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History. University of Pittsburgh Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt7zwbgz.
Davies, Martin, and Stein Helgeby. 2014. “Idealist Origins: 1920S and Before.” In History of Philosophy in Australia and New Zealand, edited by Graham Oppy and Nick Trakakis, 15–54. Springer.
Hutton, Sarah. 2014. “Intellectual History and the History of Philosophy.” History of European Ideas 40 (7): 925–37. https://doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2014.882054.
Milligan, Ian. 2013. “Illusionary Order: Online Databases, Optical Character Recognition, and Canadian History, 19972010.” Canadian Historical Review 94 (4): 540–69. https://doi.org/10.3138/chr.694.
Moody-Turner, Shirley, and Anna J. Cooper. 2015. “"Dear Doctor Du Bois": Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Du Bois, and the Gender Politics of Black Publishing.” MELUS 40 (3): 47–68. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24570162.
Owens, Trevor, and Thomas Padilla. 2020. “Digital Sources and Digital Archives: Historical Evidence in the Digital Age.” International Journal of Digital Humanities 1 (3): 325–41. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42803-020-00028-7.
Pigden, Charles. 2011. “Getting the Wrong Anderson? A Short and Opinionated History of New Zealand Philosophy.” In The Antipodean Philosopher: Public Lectures on Philosophy in Australia and New Zealand, edited by Graham Oppy and Nick Trakakis, 169–95. Lexington Books.
Putnam, Lara. 2016. “The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast.” The American Historical Review 121 (2): 377–402. https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/121.2.377.
Wilson Black, Joshua. 2022. “Creating Specialized Corpora from Digitized Historical Newspaper Archives.” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 38 (2): 779–97. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqac079.

Bonus: Against keyword search.

Digitisation

  • Digitisation has had a massive effect on historical scholarship
  • Digitisation of the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail resulted in:
    • a tenfold increase in citations in history dissertations,
    • these titles becoming the most cited in the Canadian Historical Review, and
    • no visible change in techniques of citation (Milligan 2013; cited in Putnam 2016)

Keyword search

  • Compare to physical archival work:
  • No good for anything which requires representativeness.
  • Fine if all we need is an existence proof.

Keyword search

DAEWIN AMONG THE MACHINES. TO THE EDITOU OF THE TRESS.

  • OCR quality is a serious issue.
  • Can’t even make negative existential claims.