The Viral Texts Project presents data, visualizations, and interactive exhibits that serve to help scholars better understand how particular news stories, short fiction, and poetry “go viral” in nineteenth-century newspapers and magazines.
The overall goal of this digital project is to discern various themes that were prevalent throughout 19-century writings and determine what particular qualities allowed select writings to go “viral.” As most texts were not protected as intellectual property, it was common place for many texts to bare striking similarities to one another. As a result, the Viral Texts project is able to accomplish its goals.
The Viral Text project asks the following two questions:
- What texts were reprinted and why?
- How did ideas—literary, political, scientific, economic, religious—circulate in the public sphere and achieve critical force among audiences?
In order to accomplish the above goal, the project uses sophisticated linguistic analysis on a large database of 19-century texts gathered from various English-speaking nations.
From 2012 to 2014, Viral Texts originally focused on the reprinting of texts in the nineteenth-century United States. Later the project expanded to other countries with English language newspapers such as the nineteenth-century United Kingdom and nineteenth-century Australia.
