Explaining Geographical Variations in English Rural Infant Mortality Decline Using Place-Centered Reading

Abstract

Making effective use of digital texts is one of the major challenges facing the humanities. This article explores a novel method of using a large corpus of British newspapers to help explain why three neighboring rural districts in England showed very different patterns of infant mortality decline in the second half of the nineteenth century. Quantitative analysis does not reveal any major differences between these districts that might explain this. Repeatedly querying the corpus using different combinations of search terms and place-names, the authors show significant differences in the quality of local government between these districts. They argue that place-centered reading, as they term this approach, can be used to help explain patterns found using conventional quantitative geographical information systems (GIS) approaches.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 17 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.