Exploring the language of the popular in American and British newspapers 1833-1988

This project will establish a set of dialogues between a core of researchers who have, or are developing, expertise in aspects of the historical development of newspapers and those with expertise in the study of the changes in the language of newspapers. Furthermore, it will achieve this through the development of a consistent set of approaches to the exploitation of digital newspaper archives. The dates of the project's focus span the emergence of the modern popular newspaper from the American penny press to the circulation peak of the British Sun. 1833 sees the first developments in the USA of a daily journalism aimed commercially at a broad, popular market. This has been recognized as having triggered a series of market-oriented experiments with text, style and layout which aimed to maximize the commercial appeal and profitability of newspapers. This process was slower in the UK where newspapers were only fully able to explore their commercial potential with the lifting of the last taxes on newspapers in 1855. American influences in the evolution of a particularly British variety of popular journalism from the 1880s have been a prominent feature of Anglo-American newspaper relations from this point to the present. What has been less well documented has been the mutual influences on the development of a rhetoric of commercial appeal to popular taste by these newspapers and the impact of this rhetoric on the differing social and political contexts of the two countries. A further lack has been a longer view of how the language of the popular newspapers of the nineteenth century compare to the commercial mass circulation papers of the twentieth.

This network will provide an interdisciplinary focus to bring together researchers with interest and expertise in exploring the relationship between changes in social and technological configurations and the language of newspapers and, in turn, the impact of newspapers as they developed an increasingly important role in the communication of commercial varieties of popular culture. The disciplinary backgrounds of the core and advisory groups associated with the research network would enable the Anglo-American popular newspaper to be viewed first, from a historical-linguistic perspective; second, as an illustration of the interaction between technology, written style and visual presentation; third, as a process of appropriation of aspects of the discourse of social class in the production of populist news; fourth as a conduit for the changing currency of news itself as a popular and commercial commodity. Furthermore, the researchers would focus attention on the specifically gendered nature of much of the popular discourse within the Anglo-American newspapers of this period. Changes in the articulation of women's interests and indeed men's interest in women as a topic of popular news can be tracked as a distinctive element of popular newspapers' commercial appeal across different periods of the development of modern popular journalism.

At present work around the language of the popular press in this Anglo-American context is plentiful but fragmented. By establishing a suitable structure for discussion and subsequent publication, this research workshop will enhance transatlantic understanding of shared and contrasting popular linguistic traditions within newspapers and investigate how particular forms of popular newspaper style became successful over time and how they have adapted and changed to suit shifting cultural and economic circumstances.

The study will also enable popular representations of national and cultural identities, in particular the changing semantics, iconographies and narrative framing of patriotism and colonialism and post-colonialism, to be studied as an integral part of popular newspapers' ability to stay in tune with changes in the wider social and political world of the two nations and indeed in their interrelationship (Tunstall and Machin, 2000).

The increasing wealth of digital material brings with it the challenge of finding the most efficient and appropriate ways of exploiting that material. Large amounts of public money has been invested in the digitization of newspaper archives, particularly of the nineteenth century. This has been supplemented by private funds in both the UK and the USA. This project will begin to establish discussions how best to share good practice in exploring this material across the range of disciplinary areas which deal most frequently with newspaper texts. Furthermore, it will be exploited in ways which focus on the development of one of the most under-researched of mediated phenomena - the popular newspaper and its language. Sustained debate into these related subjects will enhance contemporary understandings of the historical material as well as the nature and challenges of contemporary popular newspapers as part of broader popular culture. Emanating from these discussions will come publication opportunities in peer-review journals such as Journalism Studies, The Journal of Historical Pragmatics, Social Semiotics whose editors are included in the lists of core network members. The interdisciplinary nature of these discussions will facilitate the broadest application of protocols to explore digital newspaper material and such procedures would be of interest to libraries, museums and schools as well as other universities in finding ways to best research such material. The willingness of the Head of Collections at the British Newspaper Library, Ed King, to be part of the core group is indicative of the potential outreach of such research into the digital holdings of libraries to librarians themselves. An end of grant one-day conference at Sheffield's Humanities Research Institute would be an excellent way of publicizing the methodologies generated as part of the research network to prospective users. The HRI will make an excellent showcase for the potential sustainability of the work emanating from this network given the reputation of its expertise in supporting and advising projects which explore the potential of digital archives as research material on projects such as the recently AHRC-funded 'The Origins of Early Modern Literature' and 'Old Bailey Proceedings Online'. The website, initiated from the early stages of the network will assist in growing awareness of the work and will be deployed in conjunction with the interactive blog to generate debate throughout and beyond the life of the network. The linkage of this website to the existing Centre for the Study of Journalism and History at the University of Sheffield will also ensure the continuing ambitions to publicize these approaches beyond the life of the project.