3-lightning talks:
Brendan Dooley, ‘The Euronews Project: an Overview’
Before modern times, news circulated in the form of weekly or biweekly semi-public manuscript newsletters (also called avvisi), a Renaissance invention consisting of usually anonymous sheets, reproduced in multiple copies, which eventually became the basis of the first printed journalism. Until now the structures of distribution have been better known than the matter distributed, an imbalance created by the sheer volume of material as well as by the technical obstacles to massive analysis. So far, conjectures about what there was in this material that could have shaped peoples’ lives, mental horizons and views of the world have been based on little or no evidence or else on printed sources, which at first circulated only sporadically, and then drew directly upon the manuscript networks. The Medici papers at the state archive in Florence contain the largest and most varied repository of this source, including sheets originating from all over Europe, bearing news from everywhere including Ireland, Scandinavia, the eastern Mediterranean, Asia and the New World. The IRC-funded EURONEWS project proposes to study this repository with a view to re-creating the news environment that shaped early modern times. This lightning talk will outline our operating procedures and preliminary conclusions.
Wouter Kreuze, ‘The 1600 Experiment: a Year of News’
The 1600 project gives us the cross-section of a year of news. In this experiment, the EURONEWS team collected and transcribed all the possible avvisi that one could find for the first year of the seventeenth century. This gives us an idea about the amount of topics and places that could appear in a one-year timeframe. The resulting data allow us to delve deeper into the avvisi. In this talk, we will explore some of the possible methods of digital analysis available to us. The dataset allows us to study the corpus as a whole, producing numbers on the total amount of avvisi, origins of the news, and the length of an average news item. But it also gives insight in the connectivity between individual news items: which words do frequently appear together? How does the word frequency change through time? And, how does the productivity of the different news centres change through the year?
Carlotta Paltrinieri and Sara Mansutti, ‘The (multi)Language of the Avvisi’
This final lighting talk will explore the multilingual dimension of the avvisi. Although gathered in Florence, the Medici avvisi came from all over Europe, traveling through the major postal hubs, including London, Antwerp, Madrid, Venice, Rome, and Naples. This globality is reflected through a series of news reported in foreign languages – Spanish, French, English, and Latin – or translated from these languages into Italian. During this talk we will show some examples, observing their structure, format, and content. Although exciting from a linguistic and cultural perspective, this variety poses a challenge when training algorithms to automatically transcribe these newsletters. We will briefly delve into the model we have created through Transkribus, and reflect upon the possibilities and limits of handwritten text recognition tools applied to our project.
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