Ryan Cordell

There’s more than one way to map an election

It’s possible that an earlier electoral map was published in a newspaper, but custom graphics were rare in those days, says Ryan Cordell, who studies information exchange in 19th-century newspapers at Northeastern University. “Images were not very common in newspapers until late in the 19th century, save the stock images used for advertisements and some […]

Hot content went viral in the 1800s, too

Page through a 19th-century newspaper and you’ll be surprised at how 21st-century it looks. Northeastern University’s Ryan Cordell tells NPR’s Scott Simon about the listicles of the 1800s.

Nieman Journalism Lab

Listicles, aggregation, and content gone viral: How 1800s newspapers prefigured today’s Internet

“If you think BuzzFeed invented the listicle, you haven’t spent enough time with 19th-century newspapers, because they’re everywhere.” That’s Ryan Cordell, a Northeastern University professor who researches virality in 19th-century newspapers, during a talk he gave recently at MIT.  

Going Viral- the 19th century way

The idea of photos, messages and text going viral is a very modern one indeed. Or is it? Northeastern University’s Ryan Cordell has been digging around in old American newspapers and he reckons the 1800s were alive with viral media. He talks about his research effort, called the Infectious Texts Project, how you track viral […]

Erez Aiden Contains Multitudes

Some scholars think that ngrams and other data-mining approaches will win acceptance when scholars make use, in a single paper, of both big data and traditional textual analysis—which Aiden and Michel do not do. Ryan Cordell, an assistant professor of English at Northeastern University, calls this “zoomable reading.” In a recent project for Digital Humanities Quarterly, he […]

Slate

Life Advice for Young Men That Went Viral in the 1850s

This anonymous list of advice for young men was a mid-nineteenth-century viral sensation, appearing in at least 28 newspapers, Northern and Southern, with datelines between 1851 and 1860. The list even made it all the way to Hawaii, and was published twice in Honolulu’s The Polynesian. A group of investigators at Northeastern University identified the list […]

Motherboard

How Stories Went Viral in Antebellum America

Researchers at Northeastern University explored this old-school viral spread, by studying 41,829 old newspapers to examine how the old gray ladies facilitated the transfer of articles and ideas across America before the Civil War. Just as with memes, the internet usually gets too much credit for killing newspapers. The newspaper that was left to be felled by Craigslist […]

On The Media

Going Viral, Antebellum Style

The Infectious Texts project at Northeastern University is making thousands of pre-Civil War newspapers searchable. Bob talks with Ryan Cordell, a leader on the project, about the mechanism behind text virality in the 1800’s and some of what’s been discovered so far. [AUDIO]

For Comfort and Posterity, Digital Archives Gather Crowds

The pressure-cooker bombs that exploded at the finish line of the Boston Marathon last April 15 shattered bodies and lives. But their impact was felt far beyond the blast radius as the shock spread and authorities set out to find the perpetrators. The ensuing manhunt put an already traumatized city on lockdown. One of the […]

Here’s How Memes Went Viral — In the 1800s

The project expects to launch by the end of the month. When it does, researchers and the public will be able to comb through widely reprinted texts identified by mining 41,829 issues of 132 newspapers from the Library of Congress. While this first stage focuses on texts from before the Civil War, the project eventually […]