Introduction

The Wilde Trials International Archive is a textbase and text-sharing detection program for analyzing international news reports about the three trials and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde. Wilde’s three trials were an international media event in the spring of 1895 and were front­page news the world over for nearly a two-month period, triggering debates about sexuality, justice, and press standards. The textbase contains news reports published in 1895 which have been gathered from newspapers around the world in a number of languages.

Home Page

The Home Page offers access to the other pages on the site through in-text links (indicated in red) and through header and footer menus. To return to the Home Page at any time, select Wilde Trials International News Archive at the top left-hand corner, or the top drop-down menu on mobile.

About

Select About from the header menu to choose one of the pages from the drop-down menu.

The Overview page provides background on Oscar Wilde’s three trials and the website’s features.

The Curatorial Statement provides information on the data sources and data curation methods used.

The News Sources page provides a full list of all sources for the news reports.

The Image Gallery contains selected images of the trials from the news reports.

The Contributors page lists all contributors to the Wilde Trials International News Archive.

Browsing the Reports

Select Reports from the header menu to choose one of the pages from the drop-down menu.

The All Reports page provides a full list of all news reports collected related to the three trials and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde. Each row in the list provides basic metadata about an individual report.

  • Headline: the headline of the individual report, which provides a link to the report.
  • Date: the publication date of the report.
  • Newspaper: the name of the newspaper in which the report was published.
  • Region: the country in which the newspaper was published.
  • City: the city in which the newspaper was published.
  • Language: the language in which the report was first published.
  • Document Matches: the number of other reports that match the report at the document-level, based on the measure of Levenshtein distance.
  • Paragraph Matches: the number of paragraphs in other reports that match paragraphs in the report, based on the measure of Levenshtein distance.
  • Words: the word count of the report, excluding the headline.

The report list shows one hundred reports at a time and can be paged through using the widget at the bottom of the reports page. Use the left-facing double arrow to to go to the first page of results and the right-facing double arrow to go to the last page of results.

The By City page allows for browsing news reports by city.

  • Use the drop-down menu of the Order By button to change "Name" to "Count;" this will rearrange the display of cities to show the number of news reports published in different cities, beginning with most to least.
  • Select a city to navigate to another page that lists all the individual reports published in the city. These can be accessed by selecting the headline of the news report.

The By Date page allows for browsing news reports by date.

  • The circled number within each day of the week indicates the number of reports published on that day. Use the drop-down menu of the Order By button to change "Date" to "Count"; this will reorganize the display of days by number of published news reports, beginning with most to least.
  • Select a day to navigate to another page that lists all the individual reports published on that day. These can be accessed by selecting the headline of the news report.

The By Language page allows for browsing news reports by language.

  • Use the drop-down menu of the Order By button to change "Language" to "Count"; this will rearrange the display to show the number of news reports published in different languagesv, beginning from most to least.
  • Select a language to view a list of all the individual reports published in the language. These can be accessed by selecting the headline of the news report.

The By Newspaper page allows for browsing newspaper titles by region.

  • Use the drop-down menu of the Order By button to change "Region" to "Count"; this will rearrange the display of newspaper titles to show the number of news reports published in different newspapers, beginning from most to least.
  • Select a newspaper title within a region to view all the individual reports published in the newspaper. These can be accessed by selecting the headline of the news report.

The By Region page allows for browsing news reports by region.

  • Use the drop-down menu of the Order By button to change "Name" to "Count": this will rearrange the regions to show the number of news reports published in different regions, beginning from most to least.
  • Select a region to view all the individual reports published in the region. These can be accessed by selecting the headline of the news report.

The By City, By Language, By Newspaper, and By Region display each category using a series of buttons or "tiles." The background for each tile represents the approximate number of reports relative to the rest of the categories for that page, much like a bar in a bar chart. The category with the most reports has an entirely filled-in background whereas the other categories will have a partially filled background. Consider the following example from the By City page:

Screenshot of Paris, London, Brooklyn, New Orleans tile.
Tiles for Paris, London, Brooklyn, and New Orleans from the By City page.

Paris has the greatest number of associated reports and so its tile is entirely filled with a darker colour; there are fewer reports associated with New Orleans and thus its tile has a shorter background. Note, however, that these backgrounds display the distribution of reports on a logarithmic (rather than linear) scale.

Individual Reports

The collection includes thousands of individual news reports on Wilde's trials and imprisonment, which can be accessed in a variety of ways via the Reports tab in the top menu bar. Here is an example of a report from the April 20th, 1895 issue of Adelaide's Evening Journal.

Reports

The main section of the individual report includes the news report. Each news report includes the following elements: a heading (when provided), the main text, and a signature (when provided). These reports have been collected and transcribed from digitized and print newspapers. The report displays in the language in which it was originally published. For non-English languages, a machine translation in English can be found by selecting the “English” tab. For information about the collection and transcription process, refer to the Curatorial Statement or contact the Principal Investigator.

Navigation

The individual report pages contain additional navigation features at the top of each page.

  • Breadcrumb menu: The "breadcrumb" menu at the top of each page displays the page's location within the hierarchy of the textbase. While there are multiple ways to access a report (see Browsing the Reports), the breadcrumb menu for a report page will always show the newspaper in which the report was published.
  • Next and Previous Reports: The Next and Previous report buttons at the top of each report page link to the reports that precede and follow the current report within the same publication by date.

Paragraph Matches

Each report shows in-line paragraph matches. These are matches to other news reports that are found at the paragraph level within the collection. Each paragraph from the individual report that matches a paragraph in another report will appear with a match button next to it. The match button indicates how many matches to that paragraph have been found. Selecting the match button displays the matches of each paragraph. Matches are based on the measure of Levenshtein distance, with 60% similarity meeting the match threshold.

Compare Paragraphs

Under each in-line paragraph match is a Compare Paragraphs button. Selecting the Compare Paragraphs button opens a new page that compares the two reports at the paragraph level.

Here is an example of a Compare Paragraphs page, showing paragraph-level matches between the April 20th, 1895 issues of Adelaide's Evening Herald and Adelaide's South Australian Register. The page displays rows of paragraphs arranged in three columns. The first column shows the original paragraph(s). The second column shows the matching paragraph(s). The third column highlights any differences between the two paragraphs. The pink shows differences in the first report and purple in the second report. The percentage underneath the row of text in this column shows the percentage of similarity between the two paragraphs.

Compare Documents

Under each in-line paragraph match is a Compare Documents button. Selecting the Compare Documents button opens a new page that compares the two reports at the document level.

Here is an example of a Compare Documents page, showing document-level matches between the April 20th, 1895 issues of Adelaide's Evening Herald and Adelaide's South Australian Register. The first column shows the original document. The second column shows the matching document. The third column highlights any differences between the two matching documents: pink shows differences in the first report and purple in the second report. The Match percentage at the top of this column shows the percentage of similarity between the two documents.

Metadata

On the upper right section of the individual report page is the Metadata panel (found below the article on mobile devices). Each report includes basic bibliographic metadata about the newspaper from which it was derived, as well as date of publication, word count, and source information. If sourced from open-access databases, a link to the facsimile is provided. In the case of certain databases behind paywalls, however, it is not possible to provide a direct link to the report. Metadata for each individual report includes:

  • Newspaper: the name of the newspaper in which the report was published.
  • Date published: the publication date of the report.
  • Region: the country and city in which the newspaper was published.
  • Original language: the language in which the report was first published.
  • Sources: the database and institution where the newspaper is located, including links.
  • Facsimile: link to the digitized copy of the report
  • Word count: the number of words in the report.
  • Report date updated: the date the report was last uploaded on the site.

Document Matches

On the lower right section of the individual report page is the Document Matches panel. This panel lists other reports that match, at the document level, the displayed report. Matches are based on the measure of Levenshtein distance, with 60% similarity meeting the match threshold. Select the title of the report to navigate directly to the matching report. Select the Compare button to go to the Compare Documents page, which compares the two reports at the document level.

Searching the Reports

Select Search from the header menu to query the textbase and find news reports. On the Search page, select the Help button for information on search-term options. Results can be filtered by selecting language, publisher, and region in the Filters panel.

Comparing the Reports

Select Compare from the header menu to compare passages from any two news reports from the collection.

  • To compare two different passages of text, enter them into the two boxes by copy and paste, and then select the Measure button.
  • This measure tool will produce text similarity scores based on a Levenshtein distance measure and highlight the differences between the two texts.

News Networks

Select News Networks from the header menu to view network graphs of the Wilde news reports in the collection.

  • Select one of the links to see a particular visualization of a news network. The network is based on matching reports data generated from the collection.
  • Each newspaper forms a node in the network, indicated by a dot on the graph. Newspapers are connected - or networked - to each other based on whether documents or paragraphs from them match. For example, if the New York Herald has any matches with the Philadelphia Times, they are networked or connected. Selecting a newspaper node will bring up metadata about its place in the network.

Data

Select Data from the footer menu to export data from the collection.

  • The Data page contains bibliographical, match, and network data about the Wilde news reports.
  • This data is exportable in UTF-8 CSV file format. The first row contains header information. Fields are quoted and separated by commas. (Make sure to select UTF-8 as the encoding in spreadsheet software).
  • The Network data exports are also formatted for use with Gephi open visualization software.
  • The data is updated periodically, and the date of the most recent update is provided.

Contact

Select Contact from the footer menu to contact the site’s Principal Investigator.

GitHub

Select GitHub from the footer menu to navigate to the GitHub account for the Wilde Trials International News Archive and the source code for the website.

Privacy Policy

Select Privacy from the footer menu for information about the data that the Wilde Trials website collects about users who visit it. The Privacy Policy also allows users to opt out of having their data collected.

License

Select License from the footer menu for information on the licenses for the news reports, for the data available for export, and for the source code for the site.