Mapping the Weather: Spatial Text Mining of Historical Newspapers and the Culture of Climate in American Cities, 1880–1920

Wright Kennedy, University of South Carolina

How did Americans talk about the weather, and did it depend on where they lived? This paper maps the cultural geography of weather discourse in historical American newspapers using geoText Explorer, a Python-based platform for large-scale text mining and geospatial visualization built on the Chronicling America archive. By querying over 2.1 million issues from roughly 1,200 U.S. publication cities (1880–1922), we trace how weather-related language varied across regions, cities, and decades in ways that traditional archival methods could not detect. geoText Explorer combines keyword search, collocation analysis, and interactive maps to explore the spatial and temporal structure of discourse. Searching weather terms such as “blizzard,” “drought,” “heat,” and related collocates, generates point density maps, animated heatmaps, and collocation bump charts showing where and when terms appeared and what words surrounded them. This allows us to compare, for instance, how Gulf Coast papers framed summer heat versus how Upper Midwest editors treated cold, or how the lexical environment of “storm” differed between coastal and interior cities. A central question is whether this cultural geography of weather writings tracks or diverges from measured meteorological conditions. We compare newspaper-derived word frequencies with daily temperature, precipitation, and wind data from NOAA historical station archives for the overlapping period 1900–1922. This juxtaposition asks whether regions with more severe or variable climates produced proportionally more weather discourse, or whether cultural and economic concerns shaped what editors deemed newsworthy. The 1880–1922 period is especially productive for such inquiry, spanning the professionalization of the U.S. Weather Bureau (1891), peak newspaper circulation, and decades of notable climatic extremes. Examining the quotidian press, which was the primary medium through which most Americans learned of distant weather, offers a window onto the formation of spatially differentiated climatic cultures and what it meant to live with, and write about, the weather.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 111. Text Mining Across Space, Time, and Languages