News As Changing Texts. Corpora, Methodologies And Analysis. Di Roberta Facchinetti, Nicholas Brownlees, Birte Bös, Udo Fries.

Abstract

The volume, published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing and divided into four chapters, explores almost four hundred years of newspaper writing. One of the assets of the book is the very chapter organization, which is not based on equally distributed time spans, but rather on relevant turning points in news history and also on the specific academic expertise of the authors. This editorial decision allows for a less pre-packaged and more lively approach to changes in news discourse and format. Another valuable aspect of the book is that, as experts and even compilers of machine-readable corpora, the authors share their personal experience and concerns with readers, such as the need to focus on amounts of news material that can be searched electronically but which can also be read and analyzed manually in their entirety. Moreover, available corpora (such as ZEN, the largest corpus of late 17^th- and 18^th-century newspapers, compiled by Fries himself et al.) are described, evaluated, and sometimes critiqued as for size and features, thus enabling the academic reader – and, more broadly, the scientific community – to gather useful information and stimuli for further research.