It is hard to exaggerate the importance of periodicals in the construction of modern social time. Periodicals are all about periodicity, temporality, and change. Their appearance turns artificial time cycles that have economic value into seemingly natural and accepted social rhythms. As part of that, periodicals play an important role in the construction of the “present” as a time frame of occurrences that happen “now”. It seems intuitive to assume that different cycles of time—such as those constructed by weeklies versus those constructed by dailies—result in different discursive manifestations of the social “now”. But we lack scholarly evidence for this assumption. 
Addressing this lacuna, this study intends to characterize the differences resulting from the shift in time cycle of the nineteenth-century Hebrew periodical HaTzfira—a prominent and long-lasting publication. This newspaper changed its publication format in 1886 from weekly to daily. We use this case study to identify the meanings and implications of time cycles in the discourse constructed in each format, and most specifically the different constructions of the "present" in each. Through the use of computational tools, and in particular topic modeling algorithms, which offer a general overview of large-scale textual corpora, we compare discursive patterns before and after this shift. This comparison is based, on the one hand, on a nuanced qualitative analysis of the resultant topics, and on the other hand, on an original mathematical analysis of the resultant vector space. On a theoretical level, this comparison will help characterize the differences between the discursive rhythms of weeklies and dailies. It will also contribute to the introduction of computational tools into the study of Hebrew historical journalism.

Constructing the Modern Jewish “Present”: Computational Analysis of Periodical Time Cycles in HaTzfira

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