Towards an Ontology and Epistemology of Text Reuse

The article explores the ontological and epistemological ramifications of text reuse, drawing on a digitized corpus of newspapers and journals from the National Library of Finland and covering the time span of 149 years from 1771 to 1920. The article examines three types of reuse cycles, rapid, slow and mid-range repetition. The argument is that text reuse has ontological ramifications on how the processes of a media network are conceived. With ontology we mean that the study of history always includes conceptualizations, either implicit or explicit, of which kinds of entities and things, as well as forms of being, there were in the past. Text reuse offers a perspective for the analysis of these “forms of being.” In the epistemological part of the study, the article studies the aspects that influence and may bias the results, focusing on the material conditions of digitization process, the problems of metadata, and the possible methodological nationalism of drawing on nationally siloed corpora.