Abstract News travels fast and far, and the general idea is that the spatial extent of news coverage has increased over time. Information flows are always involved in systems of interdependent cities. This is the reason why George Zipf and Allan Pred, both pioneers of the urban systems literature, were eager to obtain data on these relations to understand urban system dynamics. However, because of limited resources in data acquisition, they restricted their studies to small samples of cities or short periods of time. By using novel computational social science techniques on a digital archive of historical newspapers, we could map and explore changes in the spatial extent of news coverage in the Netherlands at an unprecedented detailed scale for a period of 62 years. In this paper, we analyse 24 million news items mentioning 312 different cities and towns in a sample of 31 local newspapers. Thanks to this data, we were able to reconstruct the information field of urban readerships from different cities and how it changed over time. By analysing their evolution, we find evidence of space-time contraction with an increasing coverage of faraway places in the period ranging from 1869 to 1930. However, this coverage is not evenly distributed but is characterized by a hierarchical selection process. Coverage of the largest cities in the Randstad increased at the expense of information flows from intermediate provincial cities. More generally, this paper shows how computational social science approaches may offer new ways of looking at urban dynamics with large text corpora such as digital archives of historical newspapers.

中文翻译：

---

荷兰城市之间的信息传播：使用计算社会科学方法重新审视 Zipf 和 Pred

摘要 新闻传播得又快又远，总体思路是新闻报道的空间范围随着时间的推移而增加。信息流总是涉及相互依存的城市系统。这就是城市系统文献的先驱 George Zipf 和 A​​llan Pred 渴望获得有关这些关系的数据以了解城市系统动力学的原因。然而，由于数据获取的资源有限，他们的研究仅限于小城市样本或短时间内。通过在历史报纸的数字档案中使用新颖的计算社会科学技术，我们可以以前所未有的详细比例绘制和探索荷兰新闻报道空间范围的变化，长达 62 年。在本文中，我们分析了 31 家当地报纸样本中涉及 312 个不同城镇的 2400 万条新闻。由于这些数据，我们能够重建来自不同城市的城市读者的信息领域以及它是如何随时间变化的。通过分析它们的演变，我们发现了时空收缩的证据，从 1869 年到 1930 年期间，遥远地方的覆盖范围不断扩大。然而，这种覆盖范围并不是均匀分布的，而是以分层选择过程为特征的。Randstad 最大城市的覆盖范围增加，但代价是来自中间省会城市的信息流减少。更一般地说，本文展示了计算社会科学方法如何可以提供使用大型文本语料库（例如历史报纸的数字档案）来看待城市动态的新方法。