A transnational newspaper dataset covering Spenceanism

To analyse the media legacy of English radical thinker Thomas Spence (1750–1814), his revolutionary "Plan", and his disciples (the "Spencean Philanthropists") in global press circuits, a dataset consisting of 275 Spencean-related articles in newspapers from Ireland (106 articles), the British West Indies (35), British India (29), the Australian colonies (4), Canada (1), and the United States (100) was created. The corpus consists of either the full text of each article or relevant extracts, as well as additional metadata such as source, date, title (if applicable), keyword, and region. In particular, the following databases have been relied upon: the Irish Newspaper Archives for Ireland, the Caribbean Newspapers: Digital Library of the Caribbean and Caribbean Newspapers 1718–1876 for the British West Indies, Newspapers & Gazettes – Trove for Australia, America's Historical Newspapers and Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers for the US, Newspapers.com by Ancestry for Canada, Ireland, and the US, and the British Newspaper Archive for British India, Ireland, and the Caribbean. These databases were searched using the following keywords: "Thomas Spence" [1750–1814], "Spence's Plan", "Spencean" / "Spenceans", and "Spenceanism"; "swinish multitude", "people's farm", and "pigs' meat" were also used. All databases checked for Australia, the Caribbean, India, and Canada have been exhausted, and many Irish and US-American articles have also been grabbed. Due to the low scan quality of databases, most articles needed to be copied and corrected manually. The 275 articles of the corpus consist of 167,515 tokens. In addition, 157 articles on Spence and the Spenceans from British newspapers have been downloaded, too, and were added to this dataset for qualitative analysis and comparative purposes. Overall, the dataset made available here thus consists of 432 articles. The results from analysing this corpus are shown and discussed in a paper entitled "Transnational Echoes of Spenceanism: A Text Mining Exploration in English-Language Newspapers (1790–1850)", which is accepted for publication in the International Review of Social History (IRSH).