Advertisements in nineteenth century newspapers tell us about how the burgeoning press was used to sell and buy things. They tell us not only about how consumption, commerce and marketization developed in the period, but also point at cultural and technological changes in newspapers as a medium. Our research team consisting of data scientists, linguists and historians came together to the Digital Humanities Hackathon at the University of Helsinki in May 2019 to study advertisements to understand these long-term developments. We used British Library Newspapers (BLN) provided by Gale Engage as a data set to explore and analyse more detailed topics related to advertisements in the press. All images and graphs in this blogpost are drawn from the BLN.

We soon noticed that we can read advertisements closely to identify linguistic features that are typical in advertisements whose goal are to  sell particular products. In order to use our data set and to identify computationally these features, we studied advertisements manually and grasped some meaningful features.

It is often hard to differentiate  advertisements that are meant to sell products apart from more matter-of-fact announcements such as this ad about a missing dog:

To convince readers of the benefits of a particular product, advertisements for selling  products seemed to have more adjectives . The study of ads shows a number of features that seem to be typical for advertising language in the nineteenth century. This advertisement for soap in the Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle from July 1886 is a good example of this.  

Some of the features we find most interesting, and that we think can be quantified in a reliable way, are:

1. High levels of adjective use. We found about “absolute Purity”, “Fair White Hands” and “Bright, Clear Complexion”. But it is not only an issue of praising the qualities of the product, but (excessive) adjective use can also be used to mark possible negative consequences of not using a product or things that can be remedied by using the product. Hence we are told that the soap prevents “Redness, Roughness, and Chapping”. Earlier studies have also indicated that ads may include more adjectives than general text. A preliminary quantitative analysis does, however, not suggest that overall proportions of adjectives would be higher in advertisements compared to news text. We acquired a list of adjectives in English from WordNet  and then studied the overall frequency of those adjectives in The Morning Post for advertisements and news text separately. The separation into news and advertisements builds on the article segmentation that exists in the metadata. While this metadata does include errors, we did manually evaluate its levels of precision for advertisements and found them to be on average 73 per cent up to 1830 and 87 percent for the period after 1851 (for a description see our Hackathon presentation). For The Morning Post, a conservative daily from London, the adjective share is more or less the same.

A similar plot about verbs and nouns shows that actually it is the share of verbs and nouns that is smaller in ads compared to news text. What remains to be studied if it is only particular adjectives that are more frequent in ads. Perhaps this has prompted earlier research to emphasize the role of adjectives in ads.

2. Generalizations as a way of defining the audience. Ads often define their audience by providing labels for particular groups that could benefit from a product. In this ad we found out that soap is prepared “for the delicate skin of ladies and children”. In other ads the definition of a target group may be more general, for instance by mentioning that the product is for “everyone”.

3. Quotes or expert opinion as a means to convince buyers. The soap advertisement also uses expert opinions and quotes from content customers to sell products. Both Adelina Patti and Mrs. Langtry assure any reader of the quality of Pears’ soap based on their extensive experience. Performative verbs like “assure” or “recommend” often do this kind of work in advertising texts and seem to be particularly common in certain types of ads, like job advertisements. These appear both when qualified staff is sought, but also when people with higher positions in society recommend staff for others:

A particular form of assurance are expert quotes that are used to promote certain products. These seem to have been especially important for advertisements that are related to theatre, books and other complex cultural products, and also in in the soap ad mentioned above. A quantitative analysis would allow to distinguish which products are we more likely to accompany expert statements as a way of persuading potential consumers. However, due to lacking optical character recognition quality, identifying quotes in ads was more unreliable than we had hoped for, so we decided to pursue this possibility later.

4. Repetition. Finally, advertisement text made extensive use of repetition. In the advertisement for Pears’ soap, repetition is used in two ways. First, the brand is mentioned repeatedly in the running text to remind the reader about the soap that is sold “everywhere”. Additionally, “Nice Hands” is repeated eighteen times in the left column of the ad. Here, “Nice Hands” is a selling point, but it also serves a visual purpose. The Morning Post did not include images as a way of distinguishing itself as a conservative and serious newspaper from any papers that were driven by visuals. For the ads, visual repetition like this was a way of bringing forward an ad in the midst of a whole page that might have been cluttered with small textual ads or notices.

And as a means of showing the power of repetition:

And do not forget that ads did not only repeat the same thing. Sometimes they also wrote the same thing over and over again:

Or they could include something that is is completely redundant:

 

Written by Hyun Jung Kang, Anna Obukhova and Jani Marjanen

Data analysis by Ruben Ros

 

Bibliography

Leech, Geoffrey N. (1966). English in advertising: A linguistic study of advertising in Great Britain. London: Longmans.

Gotti, Maurizio. (2005). Advertising discourse in eighteenth-century English newspapers. 10.1075/pbns.134.05got.

Lyna, Dries & Damme, Ilja Van (2009) A strategy of seduction? The role of commercial advertisements in the eighteenth-century retailing business of Antwerp, Business History, 51:1, 100-121, DOI: 10.1080/00076790802604475

Miller, George A. (1995). WordNet: A Lexical Database for English. Communications of the ACM Vol. 38, No. 11: 39–41.

Richards, Thomas. (1990). The commodity culture of Victorian England: Advertising and spectacle, 1851–1914. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

During the Digital Humanities Hackathon 2019 in Helsinki our group is researching advertisements in newspapers. This blog post is part of our case study on drug ads. The blog post shows first results and the methods we used. Many of the results raised new question and could open up new interesting research fields.

In the 19th century the first aim of an advertiser was to ensure that his message caught the eye among the vast variety of notices of different kinds in small letters. This meant that the visual presentation of advertisements, and particularly of medical ones, was one of the main tools to attach viewers’ attention in the first place. To sell drugs, companies often used inventive ways to market their products. Apart from addressing certain illnesses or medicines, drugs ads have also reflected gender distinction either with their linguistic styles or visual images as a part of the products’ marketing.

During the Victorian period there were four leading pill-makers who also made the most of the newspaper advertising; James Morison, the creator of Universal Pills, a ‘venerable’ Salopian called Thomas Parr who sold “Parr’s Life Pills” to increase the beauty of women, Thomas Holloway who is also classified as a first world-wide advertiser, and Thomas Beecham who invented “Beecham’s Pills” and claimed to cure “bilious and nervous disorders” ¹

One of the most lucrative and deceptive areas of advertising involved the so-called  “patent” medicines. Actually, they weren’t patented and they were not really medicine, but rather, exotic concoctions of  liquor and narcotics, as noted in the 1900 Puck Magazine illustration above ². Prior to the regulation of both medicine and advertising in the 1900s by the British government, patent medicines were frequently touted as effective treatments for illnesses as serious as cancer and liver disease. However, many of the pills and syrups were exposed as having no effect or contained dependent ingredients.

Research questions

• How are keywords related to gender (women/men) and distributed over time in drug ads?
• What adjectives were used in drug ads for women or men?
• What kind of illnesses appeared in drug ads for women or men?
• What pictures were used in drugs ads for women or men?

Approach / Methods

The following section will line out our approach for using computational methods to gain insights into gender and drug advertisement. The first part lines out a computational approach to extract the words associated with gender in drug advertisement in the newspaper “The Morning Post” in the 19th century (1800 -1900). For the examples and visual advertisements in this blog post we also used other newspapers than “The Morning Post”.

The latter part shows how we used the advanced Gale search engine (http://gdc.galegroup.com/gdc/artemis/AdvancedSearchPage?p=BNCN) to enrich a qualitative insight into the images used in drug advertisement in the 19th century.

Macroanalysis

As the programming language for our study we used Python along with an array of complimenting libraries for doing data analysis. As our IDE we used Jupyter notebooks, as they allow for a segmented coding environment where the code runs directly in the browser and is easy to document.

We started by extracting the dataset of advertisements from The Morning Post from the Octavo API (https://app.swaggerhub.com/apis-docs/comhis/octavo/1.3.0#/). In order to do make a local version of the data we created a subset consisting of 40,000 advertisements from each decade. We then tokenized the data by removing all non-alphanumeric characters.

Microanalysis

To get access to images from the advertisement we used the new Gale Search Engine (http://gdc.galegroup.com). We used the advanced search functionality to get all the hits annotated as “Advertisements”. We then searched for the keywords from our list of medical keywords, and filtered for images. The images were then copied, selected and interpreted.

We also used microanalysis constantly to check the results of the data analysis.

What were the difficulties with the analysis for this case study?

• One problem was the under-segmentation of the available advertisements. We then used co-occurrence analysis and vector space analysis to get meaningful results.
• As usual when working with historical newspapers, OCR problems potentially affected our analysis.
• No visualization of the relationship between original text and data exists. This made it difficult for us to proof the results.
• As usual when working with historical newspapers, we had the problem of selection bias. We countered this problem by using one big newspaper where we had a sense of the context.
• There are no relative frequencies in the Gale interface

First Results

Pills for women or men?

Figure 1 shows the distribution of gender related keywords over time in drug ads in the 19th century. For the analysis we used following keywords (male, men, man, gentlemen, boy, boys, gentlemen, female, girl, woman, women, wife, wifes, females, girls). The figure shows interesting and surprising results at the same time. In the first decades of the 19th century, males dominated in drug ads, even though females were addressed more and more frequently. Between 1860 and 1880, keywords related to men raised again. This surprisingly turned around in between 1880 and 1900. Keywords related to women were mentioned more often than keywords related to men:

Gender descriptive language in primarily female and male drug ads?

As men and women have different stereotypes in general, adjectives in advertisements for each gender are used differently. But does this apply also to the 19th century drug ads?

It can be said that there were obvious differences in the use of of adjectives in male or female related drug ads. As seen from the word clouds and figures below, “nervous” as a sign of emotional weakness and “delicate” dominated the female drug ads while “respectable”, or “good” were typical adjectives in male drug ads.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Although the adjective “nervous” dominated the drug advertisements for women, it also occurred in the male context within the seven most frequently used adjectives.

Pills for diseases of the nervous system for women:

Pills for diseases of the nervous system for men:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is very interesting that the use of the word “nervous” in women’s advertisements was less common after 1860, but this development did not occur in men’s drug advertising.

A closer look into the drug advertisements has given possible solutions for this development. It may be that pills for nervousness did not longer have the same market in the new era of psychological treatment. In addition, the word neurosis became more frequent in the English language in the 1860s onwards. And neurosis is often tied to the process of medicalization of psychological issues. Nervous disorders in female related ads did more and more appear in other contexts than drug selling. For example, in the context of electro-therapy:

Different sexes, different (amount of) diseases?

Another noteworthy point of the gender-relevant content of drug ads was the distribution of genders according to the illnesses. Female images were primarily used for the diagnoses related to nerves or anxiousness as a reference to their being more emotional, whereas male figures were used in the context of severe diseases like cardiovascular conditions ³ or rheumatism.

 

Even at first glance it becomes clear that drug ads for men and women are linked to diseases in ratio 25:9 respectively. The two graphs have only asthma, bile, colds, and plaints in common. Drug ads for men contained a long list of various serious illnesses like rheumatism, pulmonary diseases, epilepsy, scurvy, dyspepsia, deafness etc. while ads for women addressed “soft diseases” like heartburn or colds.

It is necessary to note that out of the common health issues, asthma is mentioned mostly in female related drug ads, whereas it is very slight for males throughout the whole century.

Gender stereotypes in visualized drug advertisements in the 19th century?

Drug advertisements of the period in question put a prominent accent on the featuring  human figures; often women, sometimes men and in a few cases children, and each of them represented in different styles – mostly patterned on cultural stereotypes and standards.

Images in drug advertisements started to surface after 1850. Before 1850, hardly any images were used to advertise pills or waters (liquid medicines, e.g. syrup). “Parr’s Life Pills”,  an example of patent medicines marketed as cure-alls, was one of the companies using pictures in the advertisements already in the 1850s. Parr’s advertisement is showing a large group of people with Parr himself in the centre shooting with a crossbow displaying his own strength and healthiness while others, mostly females, are admiring him.

Also Holloway’s pills is using visualized ads in the 1850s. Just like Parr, Holloway used a large group of people as an image, putting a male in the center again, possibly just like Parr showing himself?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

While drug ads in the 1850s where showing specific scenes involving figures in action, drug ads of the late 19th century were illustrated with static female figures (Figures 17 and 18) but again men in action (Figures 19 and 20).  Drug advertisements in the 1880s till mid 1890s were dominated by female images, whereas the opposite sex became more frequent after 1895.

When it comes to facial expressions, women are shown calmer and serious while men are more natural and ambitious:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Written by Sarah Oberbichler, Khanim Garayeva, and Kalle Kusk Gjetting

Data analysis by Ruben Ros

Edited by Ilona Pikkanen

↑¹ Turner, Ernest Sackville. The Shocking History of Advertising, Great Britain 1965. pp. 61-64; Advertisement for Beecham’s Pills, in: https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/advertisement-for-beechams-pills, 21.05.2019.
↑² History of Advertising Regulation in Communication Law and Ethics. An open-content course for Radford University COMS 400 Students and others [https://revolutionsincommunication.com/law/?page_id=730], 21.05.2019.
↑³ Wanda Leppard, Shirley Matile Ogletree, and Emily Wallen, Gender Stereotyping in Medical Advertising:
Much Ado About Something? in: Sex Roles (1993), 29/llH2, pp. 1.

 

The Newspapers group studies the relationship between advertising and journalistic ideals in the nineteenth century. Our team consists of students in computer science, history and literature from Italy, Azerbaijan, the Netherlands, Kazakhstan, South Korea, Pakistan, France, Russia, Denmark, Ecuador and Finland.

Bolivia Erazo did her doctoral studies in cultural history at the University of Turku, Finland. In her monograph, she examined the coming of sound cinema to Quito, Ecuador in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In general, she is interested in media history.

 

Khanim Garayeva is a first year PhD student of the English Literary Studies in the University of Szeged, Hungary. Her main research area is the Historiographic Metafiction in the Contemporary British Literature, however, DH is her another academic focus.

 

Kalle Kusk Gjetting is an Information Studies student from Aarhus University. His main interest is mixed-method approaches within both humanities and computer science.

 

 

Zafar Hussain is a Data Science master student at university of Helsinki. He is a researcher at computational history group, University of Helsinki. His research interests include bridging the gap between humanities and computer science.

 

Hyun Jung Kang is a PhD student at University of Paris Nanterre. Her main research interests lies in the area of computational linguistics and its application to the behavioral and social sciences. Her current research focuses on opinion mining of online reviews written in French. But she is looking forward to doing linguistic analysis in other subjects such as digital humanities and forensic science.

 

Sarah Oberbichler is a postdoctoral researcher and works at the Department of Contemporary History at the University of Innsbruck. She is currently working in two projects on digital newspapers and digital archives. Her research interests are European and regional contemporary history, migration history, media, and digital humanities.

 

 

Anna Obukhova is a Russian Language and Literature student in the University of Helsinki. She is interested in discourse analysis, corpus linguistics and language of newspapers.

 

 

Nejma Omari is a PhD student at Paul Valery Montpellier III University. She is currently preparing a doctoral thesis in french literature and digital humanities under the supervision of Marie-Eve Therenty. She works on the relationship between newspapers and literature, collection of articles and media culture in the 19th century.

 

Anastasia Pustozerova is a Master student in Vienna University of Technology. She is doing research in machine learning, currently working on privacy techniques in ml.

 

 

Ruben Ros is a student of History at Utrecht University. He is interested in DH and conceptual history and previously worked as an intern in the Helsinki Computational History Group.

 

 

Our team leaders

Antoine Doucet is a tenured Full Professor at the L3i laboratory of the University of La Rochelle since 2014. He obtained a PhD in computer science from the University in Helsinki in 2005, and holds a French habilitation (HDR) since 2012. Antoine’s main research interests lie in the fields of information retrieval (structured and semi-structured) and natural language processing.

Axel Jean-Caurant  is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of La Rochelle. His main interests concern digital humanities, word embeddings and information access. He is currently working on a project about digital newspapers.

 

 

Jani Marjanen is a postdoctoral researcher at the Helsinki Computational History Group, University of Helsinki. He is a trained historian who has focused on the development of the publich sphere and the theory and method of conceptual history.

 

 

Jean-Philippe Moreux joined the BnF in 2012 as OCR and digital publishing formats expert and is now Gallica scientific advisor. In addition to being a member of the ALTO Editorial Board, he currently works on all heritage digitization programs and research projects (NLP, text and data mining, OCR, etc.) BnF participated to, as well as on the application of research results to digital libraries.

Dr. Ilona Pikkanen works at the Research Department of the Finnish Literature Society. Her research interests include the comparative, long-term study of historiography and historical fiction.