Antebellum Data Journalism: Or, How Big Data Busted Abe Lincoln

[LiberalElite]

http://www.propublica.org/nerds/item/antebellum-data-journalism-busted-abe-lincoln?google_editors_picks=true

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This story was prepared for the March 2014 conference, "Big Data Future," at Ohio State's Moritz College of Law, and will be published in I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society, 10:2 (2015). For more information, see http://bigdatafuture.org.

It’s easy to think of data journalism as a modern invention. With all the hype, a casual reader might assume that it was invented sometime during the 2012 presidential campaign. Better-informed observers can push the start date back a few decades, noting with self-satisfaction that Philip Meyer did his pioneering work during the Detroit riots in the late 1960s. Some go back even further, archly telling the tale of Election Night 1952, when a UNIVAC computer used its thousands of vacuum tubes to predict the presidential election within four electoral votes.

But all of these estimates are wrong – in fact, they’re off by centuries. The real history of data journalism pre-dates newspapers, and traces the history of news itself. The earliest regularly published periodicals of the 17th century, little more than letters home from correspondents hired by international merchants to report on the business details and the court gossip of faraway cities, were data-rich reports.

Early 18th century newspapers were also rich with data. If it were ever in doubt that the unavoidable facts of human existence are death and taxes, early newspapers published tables of property tax liens and of mortality and its causes. Commodity prices and the contents of arriving ships — cargo and visiting dignitaries — were a regular and prominent feature of newspapers throughout the 18th and 19th centuries.
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[monmouth4]

1. My grandmother Collins-Murphy had been in this country for many years and still checked the

papers for a recognized name from Cork or Mayo. Old habits die hard...This was back in the late 30s, early 40s and I guess some papers still carried that info...