Hastings, Sarah and Gregory, Ian and Atkinson, Paul (2015) Explaining geographical variations in English rural infant mortality decline using place-centred reading. Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History, 48 (3). pp. 128-140. ISSN 0161-5440
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Abstract
Making effective use of digital texts is one of the major challenges facing the humanities. This paper explores a novel method of using a large corpus of British newspapers to help explain why three neighbouring 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 placenames, we show significant differences in the quality of local government between these districts. We argue that place-centred reading, as we term this approach, can be used to help explain patterns found using conventional quantitative Geographical Information Systems (GIS) approaches.