Dr Jennifer Batt, Senior Lecturer at the University of Bristol, reported on an investigation in finding verse using text and data-mining methods in a collection of digitised eighteenth-century newspapers in the British Library’s Burney Collection to recover a complex, expansive, ephemeral poetic culture that has been lost to us for well over 250 years. The collection equates to around 1 million pages, around 700 or so bound volumes of 1271 titles of newspapers and news pamphlets published in London and also some English provincial, Irish and Scottish papers, and a few examples from the American colonies.

A video of her presentation is available below:

Jennifer's slides are available on SlideShare by clicking on the image below or following the link:

Datamining for verse in eighteenth-century newspapers

https://www.slideshare.net/labsbl/datamining-for-verse-in-eighteenthcentury-newsapers