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

Sarah Genevieve Hastings, Ian Gregory and Paul Atkinson

Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History, 2015, vol. 48, issue 3, 128-140

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.

Date: 2015
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DOI: 10.1080/01615440.2014.995390

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