Information Highways of the 19th Century: The public sphere as newspaper infrastructure and shared content

The purpose of the project is to provide a new interpretation of the birth in the 19th century of the now supposedly dying public sphere. This means challenging, and nuancing and pinning down the specifics, of a long-standing, but empirically weakly substantiated, grand narrative. With access to the whole Swedish press (some 4.5 million pages) and the powerful BLAST algorithm, the aims of the project are 1) the mapping of the newspaper infrastructure and its information flows, 2) the description and interpretation of the directions, speed, and content of these textual flows, and 3) the understanding of the interrelations of infrastructure and content as well as of how and why patterns changed, and when and, if so, more precisely in what ways, it is justifiable to speak of a public sphere.