Computing Historical Consciousness. A Quantitative Inquiry into the Presence of the Past in Newspaper Texts

Abstract

In this paper, some electronically gathered data arepresented and analyzed about the presence of the pastin newspaper texts. In ten large text corpora of sixdifferent languages, all dates in the form of yearsbetween 1930 and 1990 were counted. For six of thesecorpora this was done for all the years between 1200and 1993. Depicting these frequencies on the timeline,we find an underlying regularly declining curve,deviations at regular places and culturally determinedpeaks at irregular points. These three phenomena areanalyzed.

Mathematically spoken, all the underlying curves havethe same form. Whether a newspaper gives much orlittle attention to the past, the distribution of thisattention over time turns out to be inverselyproportional to the distance between past and present.It is shown that this distribution is largelyindependent of the total number of years in a corpus,the culture in which it is published, the language andthe date of origin of the corpus. The phenomenon isexplained as a kind of forgetting: the larger thedistance between past and present, the more difficultit is to connect something of the past to an item inthe present day. A more detailed analysis of the datashows a breakpoint in the frequency vs. distance fromthe publication date of the texts. References toevents older than approximately 50 years are theresult of a forgetting process that is distinctivelydifferent from the forgetting speed of more recentevents.

Pandel's classification of the dimensions ofhistorical consciousness is used to answer thequestion how these investigations elucidate thehistorical consciousness of the cultures in which thenewspapers are written and read.