The Life and Times of The Times of India

Using the Proquest Times of India Corpus spanning 18XX--2008, we shed light on a slew of interesting questions.

Scripts

• Parse ToI Parse XML to CSV. Here's the data dictionary

• Basic Analyses

  1. number of articles per issue (by pub_date/year/month/weekday--weekend)
  2. number of words per article/title over time
  3. number (proportion) of articles by contributor w/ TNN (rest are presumably sourced via AP etc. but good to groupby)
  4. gender, religion etc. of contributors -- histogram of top 50 names, surnames using naampy and pranaam
  5. number of contributors per article
  6. number of editorial/news

• NER

• NER analyses

  1. Histogram of top 50 people covered.
  2. Histogram of top 50 places covered
  3. Gender, religion of people mentioned using naampy and pranaam

• Other Ideas

  1. number of classified ads (on startpage == 1)
  2. number of ads (on startpage == 1)
  3. US vs. USSR/Russia etc.
  4. matrimonial ads: "caste no bar", 'fair complexion', etc.
  5. Need Annotation
     • news/not news
     • gov vs. not in ads
     • episodic'---x happened vs. 'thematic' --- more detailed/contextual piece
     • local/national/foreign news