Daniel Evans's Preliminary Exam
PhD Student will Daniel Evans will present his dissertation proposal, "Quantifying the Press: Leveraging AI to Remediate Historical Newspaper Directories." His preliminary examination committee includes Professor J. Stephen Downie (Chair), Assistant Professor Zoe LeBlanc (Director of Research), Associate Professor Ryan Cordell, and Associate Professor David Smith (Northeastern University).
Abstract
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, major advertising agencies compiled annual business directories that provided detailed data on newspapers and periodicals across the United States. These directories not only guided advertisers in shaping market strategies; they also laid the groundwork to determine which newspapers were preserved in libraries, archives, and, eventually, digitized collections. This dissertation re-examines those directories through a computational lens to demonstrate how for-profit advertising agencies, such as George P. Rowell & Company and N.W. Ayer & Sons, influenced the “preserved and remediated” record of American newspapers, thereby structuring our access to cultural heritage.
Until recently, the complex layouts of these directories required painstaking manual entry to create data from their valuable entries. For the first time, this project harnesses AI techniques to extract and clean their data, offering both a deeper understanding of the industry and fresh insight into the evolution of directories themselves—resources that continue to shape historical and contemporary media landscapes. Ultimately, this work seeks to aid future scholars in both libraries and academia to better understand the American newspaper industry while informing a more equitable approach to preservation and digitization.
Question? Contact Daniel Evans.