{"id":9,"date":"2025-10-27T17:34:22","date_gmt":"2025-10-27T17:34:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/classprojects.digitalwcu.org\/RuessViralTexts\/?page_id=9"},"modified":"2025-11-11T01:32:08","modified_gmt":"2025-11-11T01:32:08","slug":"overview","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/classprojects.digitalwcu.org\/RuessViralTexts\/overview\/","title":{"rendered":"Overview"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Introduction from The Viral Texts Project<\/a><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

This site presents\u00a0data<\/a>,\u00a0visualizations<\/a>,\u00a0interactive exhibits<\/a>, and both\u00a0computational and literary publications<\/a>\u00a0drawn from the\u00a0Viral Texts<\/em>\u00a0project, which seeks to develop theoretical models that will help scholars better understand what qualities\u2014both textual and thematic\u2014helped particular news stories, short fiction, and poetry \u201cgo viral\u201d in nineteenth-century newspapers and magazines. During this period, texts published in newspapers and magazines were not typically protected as intellectual property, and so literary texts as well as other non-fiction prose texts circulated promiscuously among newspapers as editors freely reprinted materials borrowed from other venues. In the\u00a0Viral Texts<\/em>\u00a0project, we ask: What texts were reprinted and why? How did ideas\u2014literary, political, scientific, economic, religious\u2014circulate in the public sphere and achieve critical force among audiences? By employing and developing computational linguistics tools to analyze the large textual databases of nineteenth-century newspapers newly available to scholars, this project will generate new knowledge of the nineteenth-century print public sphere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Who:<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Primary Investigators<\/h2>\n\n\n\n