Orchid Fever in the American Press
Orchid Fever in the American Press
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The Orchid Craze of the late 19th century, also known as Orchidelirium or Orchid Fever, inspired a new profession, orchid hunting. Orchid hunters risked (and lost) their lives on dangerous journeys in search of rare, expensive flowers for the wealthy collectors back home. This project used Python to search Chronicling America, a Library of Congress database of digitized historic newspapers, for articles on orchid hunting published between 1881 and 1960. The articles' data and text were scraped with Beautiful Soup. The Natural Language Toolkit helped to analyze the frequency of words and names in article text. Three WordCloud visualizations were created with MatPlotLib.
The results can be used by anyone with an interest in orchid hunting, and the project can be adapted for searching other topics in Chronicling America. The code for this project is available on GitHub.
This project can be taken further by incorporating Stanford NER Tagger.
Top Words and Names
Top Words and Names
Unsurprisingly, the most frequent words are orchid and orchids, followed by hunter, hunters, and plant-related terms.
Top Words
Top Words
After filtering out named entities, we see more terms like rare, collection, collector, beautiful, specimens, and expedition.
Top Named Entities
Top Named Entities
London, the center of Orchid Fever, is frequently mentioned, but few of the famed British orchid hunters were reported on in the American press. Unfortunately, Indians is probably so prominent due to stories about clashes between orchid hunters and indigenous communities. The most written about orchid species were Odontoglossum and Cattleya. Some orchid destinations that appear are Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Madagascar, the Philippines, and Venezuela. The Orinoco River, a common route for orchid hunters, is also visible.
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