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Abstract
Franklin Ford (1849–1918) is mostly known for his association with the philosopher John Dewey in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Together, they attempted to launch Thought News, a “philosophical newspaper” that never saw the light of day. But both before and after that failed project, Ford never stopped developing a vision for the future of the news. Reading Ford is a jumping-off point for experimentations that raise original methodological questions in the field of media history and theoretical developments that speak to contemporary media problems. In that regard, our paper focuses on the methodological experiment undertaken to explore Ford’s work: the creation of an automated Twitter account, a “bot” that uses text-mining techniques to automatically tweet excerpts from his writings. The paper describes the concrete steps of that remediation: from the delineation of Ford’s written work to the gathering and digitization of the material and its transformation into tweetable soundbites. We argue that this combination of close and automated reading offers heuristic elements of surprise to guide the historical inquiry. As the tweets echo the specific genre of today’s “future-of-the-news” thinkers, they also constitute an attempt to explore the relationship between “old” and “new” media.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We are also grateful for the help we received from archivists at Columbia University Library, the Library of Michigan, the Massachusetts Historical Library, the AT&T Archives and History Center, the University of Washington Special Libraries, the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan, and the Delmar T. Oviatt Library of the California State University at Northridge. Finally, we also wish to thank the anonymous reviewers from Digital Journalism and the American Journalism Historians Association for their insightful and generous comments.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
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Notes on contributors
Juliette De Maeyer
Juliette De Maeyer (author to whom correspondence should be addressed), Department of Communication, Université de Montréal, 90 avenue Vincent d’Indy, Montreal, Quebec H3C 3J7, Canada. Email: [email protected].
Dominique Trudel
Dominique Trudel, Department of Arts and Letters, Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, 555 boulevard de l’Université, Chicoutimi, Quebec G7H 2B1, Canada. Email: [email protected].