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Distinguishing Newspaper Genres. Exploring Automated Classification of Journalism's Modes of Expression

This paper examines the opportunities, approaches and issues of automatically classifying historical newspaper articles from the Netherlands for ‘genre’ as an expression of the historically and culturally determined conception of journalism. Genre is defined as “language use in a conventionalized communicative setting in order to give expression to a specific set of communicative goals of a disciplinary or social institution, which give rise to stable structural forms” (Handford 2010). As Barnhurst and Nerone (2001) argue: “The form includes the way the medium imagines itself to be and to act. In its physical arrangement, structure, and format, a newspaper reiterates an ideal for itself.” Examining the generic form of newspaper articles form a historical perspective therefore sheds an interesting light on the way newspaper journalism has developed. The digital era, which is typified as the ‘age of abundance’ of historical newspaper material, poses new challenges to historical research. Historical approaches to selecting and analyzing newspapers, rooted in the assumption of a scarcity of available material, had to be replaced with social scientific methods, such as quantitative content analysis (Nicholson 2013; Broersma 2009). Yet, manual quantitative content analyses are still highly time consuming and therefore expensive. Moreover, even then the size of the material that can be covered represents only a small part of the amount of material available (Harbers 2014). Automated forms of (content) analysis have the potential to alleviate or even solve this issue. As such, automatic forms of content analysis would be highly suitable for longitudinal and also comparative historical research into the development of newspapers, which particularly grapples with the overabundance of available research material (Broersma 2009). However, although these approaches have a great appeal to researchers (Allen, Waldstein & Zhu 2008; Grimmer & Stewart 2013), research in this vein is mostly done in information science and linguistics. It seldom has a press historical perspective (Broersma 2009). Moreover, the emphasis has mostly been on topical modeling (Lee & Myaeng 2002), whereas attention for automatic classification of style and genre is scarce. Rather than determining what subjects and themes are being discussed, this project aims to examine genre as a modes of expression of newspapers, shedding light on the discursive context (Handford 2010). This is a particularly difficult task as genres are dynamic and can change or fade away over time while new ones can emerge. Moreover, genres are ideal-typical discursive constructs, which means the textual manifestations do not always match the characteristics of these constructs perfectly, nor can they always be clearly delineated from other genres. The research question therefore is: