Communication Landscapes of the 19th Century: The Speed and Geographical Coverage of News in the Rigasche Zeitung
In times when communication networks had not yet reached modern speeds, there was an explicit emphasis placed on the origin of each piece of information. In 17th–19th century newspapers, news from abroad were almost always accompanied by the content’s date and place of origin. Using these data from a vast corpus of digitized newspapers (ca 300 000 articles spanning 87 years), this presentation aims to map the European information network as seen from the Baltic provinces. Likewise, it explores the effects brought about by economic and political changes, as well as by developments in transportation and communication.