Digital Scissors, Computational Paste: Re-Visualising the Content of 19th Century Newspapers

We are all familiar with the ideal newspaper—the headlines, datelines, and by-lines, the photos, the captions, and the ads. But can we step away from this image and re-imagine the newspaper as a basket of words, or of ideas, curated and arranged in different ways for different ends? This paper will discuss methods for cataloguing and re-conceptualising the content of nineteenth-century newspapers through different data visualisations and how to leverage our widening access to digital newspaper transcriptions to understand the newspaper as a both a unified genre and diverse collection of independent publications.