Magazine ecology: environmental knowledge infrastructures in nineteenth-century periodical publishing

While much of nineteenth century environmental history has been dominated by seminal figures like Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir, by foregrounding the content and the ideas in the publications that they wrote for, it becomes possible to see these writers in a much broader historical context. To recapture this history, I examine over 2,600 digitized issues of popular magazines drawn from the HathiTrust Digital library using a computational approach called topic modeling to identify statistically meaningful sets of related words or topics.

Moving between the analytical scales of topic modeling and close reading reveals trends in environmental thought during the latter half of the nineteenth century. I show, for instance, that in the decades after the Civil War, growing concerns about the environmental impacts of industrialization were paired with a growing faith in technology’s ability to remake the landscape. I also demonstrate how specialized magazines like Forest and Stream and Outing catalyzed and organized interest in conservation even as they also narrowed the conservationist community.

My research offers a more nuanced and pluralistic history of environmental writing and ideas in the nineteenth century, illustrating the power of print in shaping environmental consciousness. I demonstrate that, far from the story of a few influential authors, nineteenth century environmental thought is much more the product of a constellation of writers responding to an array of factors including industrial development, scientific advancement, and the expansion of outdoor recreation, a complex information environment that we can begin to see through the pages of magazines.