Reading Beyond the Center. Modeling Book Encounters in the Danish Periphery (1800-1850)

This paper investigates the reading culture of peripheral regions in nineteenth-century Denmark by analyzing book advertisements in six local Danish newspapers, a source that provides valuable insights into the characteristics of literary culture and its mediation through the local press. Drawing on previous studies and theories of reading culture, book circuit, and cultural peripherality, this study challenges center-oriented narratives in studies of Danish reading culture. Using a pipeline that combines article classification, book title extraction with generative language models, and manual genre clustering, this paper presents a dataset comprising 900,000 digitized news articles, along with over 6,000 book titles extracted from newspaper advertisements. These titles are categorized into knowledge- and leisure-oriented reading, revealing a more diverse literary landscape than previously assumed. The data indicate coexisting practices of intensive and extensive reading and show significant variation across towns in both genre distribution and circulation patterns. The analysis reveals that each town in the periphery had its own distinctive reading profile, demonstrating that literary engagement in these regions was varied and locally rooted, rather than uniform or marginal.