Detecting and Analyzing Text Reuse with BLAST

In this thesis I expand upon my previous work on text reuse detection. I propose a novel method of detecting text reuse by leveraging BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool), an algorithm originally designed for aligning and comparing biomedical sequences, such as DNA and protein sequences. I explain the original BLAST algorithm in depth by going through it step-by-step. I also describe two other popular sequence alignment methods. I demonstrate the effectiveness of the BLAST text reuse detection method by comparing it against the previous state-of-the-art and show that the proposed method beats it by a large margin. I apply the method to a dataset of 3 million documents of scanned Finnish newspapers and journals, which have been turned into text using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software. I categorize the results from the method into three categories: every day text reuse, long term reuse and viral news. I describe them and provide examples of them as well as propose a new, novel method of calculating a virality score for the clusters

"Porthanin lehti" ja otteita sen myöhemmästä elämästä

Kirjoituksessa luodaan katsaus Turussa ilmestyneeseen ensimmäiseen sanomalehteen sekä lehden materiaalin uudelleenjulkaisemiseen myöhemmässä suomalaisessa sanomalehdistössä. Kirjoitus perustuu professori Hannu Salmen johtaman Computational History and Transformation of Public Discourse in Finland, 1640–1910 -tutkimuskonsortion piirissä tehtyyn tutkimukseen, joka yhdistää historiantutkimuksen ja informaatioteknologian näkökulmia suomalaisen sanoma- ja aikakauslehtien tutkimukseen

Suomi, kulttuurihistoria ja kulttuurisuuden haaste

It is often argued that Finnish historians were the first ones in Scandinavia to publish a comprehensive cultural history of their country. The four-volume Suomen kulttuurihistoria (Cultural History of Finland) was published in 1933–1936. By now, several cultural histories have been produced. “Finland” has been the focus and the defining concept of these works, in which culture has been seen on the one hand as a whole, as an entity that has its boundaries, on the other hand as a web of significance that conveys itself through perspectives into the past. This essay concentrates on the ontological premises of cultural history and discusses both the notion of ‘culture’ and the idea of ‘culturality’. It is essential to further examine the current criticism towards the anthropocentrism of historical and cultural studies. In the study of the construction of ‘Finland’, the idea of culturality can be expanded by paying more attention to the interplay between human and non-human factors.</p

Newspaper Texts across the Baltic Sea

Non peer reviewe

Tidningstexter över Östersjön: En databas av delat innehåll mellan Finland och Sverige

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