Academic Titles in Der Tag

Articles in the German daily newspaper (1900–1920) Der Tag were often authored by individuals with academic titles, such as Dr. or Professor. Intrigued by the fact that a daily newspaper regularly engaged academics as authors, we set out to investigate whether there was any development in the number of authors with academic titles during this period, and whether such changes correlated with major historical events such as World War I or the November Revolution.
The task seemed feasible for a two-day hackathon, since authorship information usually appeared in the dataset as a single TextBlock XML element and seemed to require only a modest amount of data refinement. However, after we faced the problems of varying number of pages, and the huge presence of academic credentials in the advertisement, we decided to focus on analyzing the first three pages, as they generally contained no advertisements and primarily featured the most important articles.

We did not find any clear trend in the percentage of pages containing TextBlocks with authors’ academic titles. It would be interesting to analyze the newspaper data from the period after 1920 to determine whether the collaboration between the newspaper and academic authors declined in the 1920s. However, we observed an unexplained oscillation in 1916, when the number of articles authored by academics peaked, with more than 80% of pages containing authors’ academic credentials. A close reading of the newspaper during this particular year would likely shed light on the nature of this phenomenon.

A more detailed description and all code for the project can be found on GitHub.