Abstract

Reinventing Discourse Analysis with Big Data: Business Jargon in the 19th Century

On January 14, 1837, James Green “respectfully” informed his “friends and the Public” that, “thankful for past favors,” he had been able to enlarge his New York City store and stock of dry goods and “respectfully solicit[ed] a call” from all who might be interested. Formal phrases like these commonly appeared in business correspondence, helping entrepreneurs assert their identities as educated members of the middle class. In the unpredictable market economy of the antebellum years, one’s economic and cultural capital was dependent upon subjective valuations of status and reputation. Green’s advertisement suggests that, like other members of their class, merchants and tradesmen learned how to use language cues to signal status in the public sphere. This paper takes a longitudinal look at newspaper advertising to understand how business jargon changed over time. Using open-access repositories, we compiled a sample set of approx. 1,200 American newspaper pages (containing ~20,000 advertisements) dating from 1830-1900. To account for regional distinctions, the sample set contains both African-American and mainstream publications, in both rural and urban locales in the eastern and mid-western US. We developed a Python script to crawl this dataset and locate keywords, adjusting the script to account for variations in typography and other idiosyncrasies. Details about the publication, the specific keyword, and the surrounding context were automatically added to a spreadsheet for later evaluation. From this data, we have identified broad shifts in the language used over time, with intriguing variations along regional and racial lines. These discursive shifts suggest that the business community responded to changes in American politics and culture at different paces and along segregated frameworks. Future work will extend this analysis backward to the colonial period, to trace the rise of respectability politics in newspaper advertising and further tease out the contextual factors that shaped American business language.