Computing Historical Consciousness. A Quantitative Inquiry into the Presence of the Past in Newspaper Texts

In this paper, some electronically gathered data are presented and analyzed about the presence of the past in newspaper texts. In ten large text corpora of six different languages, all dates in the form of years between 1930 and 1990 were counted. For six of these corpora this was done for all the years between 1200 and 1993. Depicting these frequencies on the timeline, we find an underlying regularly declining curve, deviations at regular places and culturally determined peaks at irregular points. These three phenomena are analyzed. Mathematically spoken, all the underlying curves have the same form. Whether a newspaper gives much or little attention to the past, the distribution of this attention over time turns out to be inversely proportional to the distance between past and present. It is shown that this distribution is largely independent of the total number of years in a corpus, the culture in which it is published, the language and the date of origin of the corpus. The phenomenon is explained as a kind of forgetting: the larger the distance between past and present, the more difficult it is to connect something of the past to an item in the present day. A more detailed analysis of the data shows a breakpoint in the frequency vs. distance from the publication date of the texts. References to events older than approximately 50 years are the result of a forgetting process that is distinctively different from the forgetting speed of more recent events. Pandelʹs classification of the dimensions of historical consciousness is used to answer the question how these investigations elucidate the historical consciousness of the cultures in which the newspapers are written and read.