Something about the Weather Using Digital Methods to Mine Geographical Conceptions of Europe in Twentieth-Century Dutch Newspapers

How was Europe portrayed as a geographical entity in the texts of weather reports published in Dutch newspapers between 1950 and 1990? To answer this ostensibly simple question, this article uses digital methods, including text mining and visualisation techniques. It shows that digital historical research offers a way of objectifying long-term, stable subjectivities. The Dutch perception of Europe that emerges from this qualitative analysis is remarkably slanted towards distinctions between a first, second and third-degree Europe, findings that may help explain the tenacious resistance to Europe as an inclusive political project. Hoe werd Europa als geografische entiteit afgebeeld in weerberichten in Nederlandse kranten in de periode tussen 1950 en 1990? Om deze schijnbaar eenvoudige vraag te beantwoorden worden in deze bijdrage gebruik gemaakt van digitale methoden, zoals text mining en visualisatietechnieken. Het artikel toont aan dat digitaal historisch onderzoek een manier biedt om het bestaan van langdurige, stabiele subjectiviteiten te objectiveren. De Nederlandse perceptie van Europa die uit deze kwalitatieve analyse naar voren komt is opvallend gekleurd, met een duidelijk onderscheid tussen een eerste-, tweede- en derdegraads Europa. De bevindingen kunnen helpen om de hardnekkige weerstand tegen Europa als een politiek project te verklaren.


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Wind force and precipitation are not the effectuation of a programme or an agenda. True enough, the weather can be made political, for engineering meteorological conditions is not entirely a matter of science fiction. Managing the amount of rainfall or sunshine in specific places is something governments and businesses would probably like to accomplish.
In fact, seeding clouds to give rainfall a boost is one of the few techniques already in use to regulate the weather. Once technical obstacles have been surmounted, political hurdles taken and ethical issues resolved, fixing a thermostat in the sky to improve agriculture, enhance the tourist season or win wars may well become reality. 2 At this moment in time, however, weather patterns are not the result of a conscious politics. At best one could say that politics is one of many factors influencing climate change.
Of course, politics has not proven particularly effective as an instrument of climate control. But even if politics were able to impact climate change on the shorter term, the ability to control local weather conditions would still be close to zero.
In contrast to the weather itself, weather maps can be highly political.
In post-war West Germany, for instance, the principle of the Deutsches Reich in den Grenzen vom 31. Dezember 1937 was long upheld on administrative charts and in school atlases -but also in the weather maps displayed on national television, where the German imperial boundaries remained intact until 1970. 3 On the level of the nation state, weather maps are political by definition, since they show state borders that may or may not be under dispute. However, this does not apply to something as amorphous as 'Europe'.
Despite the importance of the European project for post-war states, which for much of the century funded national broadcasting corporations, governments have not demonstrated a particular interest in portraying Europe in specific ways in weather reports. As a concept, Europe simply never made it to everyday meteorology.
Nevertheless, looking at how Europe has been dealt with in practice in weather reports, assuming of course that those portrayals contain a European dimension in the first place, offers a perspective of the way larger geographical frameworks are created and maintained in the public mind. Because weather patterns are contingent on forces beyond the control of a particular nation state, the spatial representations of Europe that emerge in portrayals of the article -artikel weather in the media of a given country have less to do with the politics of culture than with the relatively fortuitous location of weather stations, the mechanisms of scientific and institutional information flows, the editorial policy of the media in question and, above all, the vagaries of the weather itself.
The nature of Europe and the 'identity' of its inhabitants have been themes of public significance ever since the 1973 Copenhagen Declaration on European Identity. There has been much debate on the subject, as the next paragraph makes clear, but little attention has been paid to what at first glance may seem trivial and mundane. This article reconstructs an unconventional image of Europe fashioned in popular Dutch media during the latter part of the twentieth century. How was Europe portrayed as a geographical entity in the texts of weather reports published in Dutch newspapers between 1950 and 1990? These meteorological descriptions include both reports that focus on Europe as such and those that allude indirectly to Europe by contextualising regional or national weather expectations. These reports were obviously intended to predict the weather and to explain to readers the arguments on which predictions were based. This article suggests that while weather reports were non-political in their intention, they were nevertheless highly political in their effects, in that they gave rise to popular conceptions of Europe not usually taken into account by politicians, philosophers or journalists. And if there is one truism that applies to weather reports, it is that they were extremely common and incredibly popular. As one newspaper put it in 1954: And what to think of the most popular feature of any newspaper? Wouldn't that be the weather report, which briefly outlines the weather's intentions, somewhere on the front page, but always on a specific spot, again and again, every day? 4 Apart from telling tales about the weather, this article has two other designs. Firstly, demonstrating that long-term and deep-rooted conceptions of Europe do exist, it claims that the modern era, for all its perceived cultural instability, exhibits persistent patterns that reflect something of a cultural longue durée. In this respect, I take issue with much of the identity politics that underlies what has become known as the so-called cultural turn, predicated as it often is on the assumption that transient, 'constructed' subjectivities are relatively easily made or van eijnatten unmade. 5 Secondly, this article argues in favour of taking seriously digital history, not as a jargon-laden enclave for nerdy historians who have lost their affinity with hermeneutics, but as a serious disciplinary undertaking accessible to all historians. For this reason, a somewhat extended outline of a simple, do-it-yourself text-mining methodology has been included as an indispensable part of this article.
In what follows I will first briefly discuss current research into narratives about Europe and then explain the theory and assumptions underlying my approach. Next, I will shed some light on the nature of the source material and explain the methodology I have employed. After that I will present and discuss my findings.

Narratives on European space
Research into the idea of, and narratives on, Europe, both contemporary and historical, has been underway for some time now. Intellectuals, we know, have often speculated on Europe as a Christian continent, as the source and bulwark of Enlightened modernity, as a coherent unity despite its political and cultural diversity, as a conglomeration of nations amenable to technocratic reconstruction with peace and prosperity as the exemplary outcome. Much of this thinking harks back to eighteenth and nineteenthcentury conceptions of European exceptionalism. These emphasised rationality as the most important characteristic of the European mind, or, alternatively, Christianity or humanism or the spirit of freedom. Narratives on Europe were not always self-congratulatory. Writers ranging from the romantic to the postcolonial have exercised a considerable degree of self-criticism, glorifying a distant past for ever beyond reach, advocating respect for a religious world view, repudiating progressivist, technologydriven modernity, noting a fatal dialectic inherent to the Enlightenment, or emphasising the continent's dark side in its role as the world's oppressor.

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Few of these narratives have offered a clear geographical conception of Europe. 7 This even applies practically without exception to the abundance of narratives used by policymakers and corporate actors to make sense of Europe in the context of European integration in the seven decades after the Second World War. One narrative is the familiar story of Europe as a project of post-war reconstruction, leading to the advancement of peace, reconciliation, democracy and human rights. Obviously formulated against the background of the eu as a legal and political unity and employed as recently as 2012 by the Norwegian Nobel Committee in awarding the Peace Prize to the eu, the narrative characteristically defines Europe, vaguely, as an inclusive idea rather than, precisely, as an exclusive one. 8 The same applies to the economic Europe of the single market, the social Europe of solidarity and financial security, the green Europe of sustainable development, and the global Europe that builds walls to dampen the effects of globalisation. These narratives and others have all been grounded in different and variable and always fuzzy visions of Europe's geographical extent. 9 In the twentieth century, conceptions of Europe reached popular audiences most effectively through mass media. This holds true for the institutional narratives on Europe of the post-war period, such as the propagandistic films about the history of European integration that initially were intended to sell the Marshall Plan to European citizens. This kind of film continued to be produced well into the 1960s 10 , and although they were targeted Western Europe, in particular the members of the European

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Coal and Steel Community (ecsc), one central aim of these official narratives was to show that the antagonism between nation states in general could and should be transcended. In consequence, Europe was portrayed as a somewhat nebulous geographical entity, as a source of human civilization -unfortunately undermined by the evils of the twentieth century -as a fundamental unity to which borders were essentially foreign, or as a unified culture based on Greco-Roman antiquity and Christianity. The main thrust of such films was to picture Europe as a natural unity to which it was beholden to return after the devastations of two world wars. Since frontiers were artificial and in any case shifted continuously, Europe was portrayed as a borderless space, inhabited by a tolerant and unprejudiced people guided by rationality and curiosity, and partial to solidarity. 11 The indistinctness of Europe as a spatial entity likewise emerged in non-official media, such as newspapers, although here the geographical bias is often more evident and the focus usually on the national context. For

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Media, whether visual, audial or textual, and whether or not they function as a conduit for official points of view, are a treasure trove of narratives about Europe. 13 Practically all of these narratives are geographically vague, and presumably they are so on purpose, given the many potential political pitfalls on a continent burdened with so complex a history. 14 Europe's geographical extent has been a major unknown for as long as narratives of Europe have existed. This does not mean that spatial conceptions of Europe did not take hold in the public mind. But until now, no-one thought to check the weather.
As noted previously, the weather is accidental to politics and ideology.
The content of weather reports (as opposed to their visual representations) offers a view of Europe relatively untainted by political and institutional interests or by the intellectual discourse of philosophers and journalists.
There is no such thing as Christian weather, nor do ocean currents care whether Europe is unified or not. But there is another significant quality characteristic of weather reports, in particular as a newspaper genre. They are entirely mundane and iterative to the extreme. During the newspaper-reading decades of the twentieth century -before the 1990s, when the internet gradually kicked in -scarcely a day went by without a report on the weather. This applies, above all, to newspapers. van eijnatten middle of the twentieth century. Effective mass communication hinges on two elements: persuasive techniques and repetition. 15 How, exactly, the one is related to the other is a matter of ongoing inquiry, but it is clear that persuasion depends to no inconsiderable degree on repetition. This is where serial publications like newspapers come in. As Benedict Anderson observed, newspapers have helped give rise to imagined communities, but the same could be said for other periodical media, including television and the internet. 16 Anderson emphasised geographically dispersed newspapers as a source of collective identity, but it will be evident that iteration over time strengthens the effect of simultaneity. Because people in the past continuously read similar things, they began to be part of the same linguistic, cultural matrix spanning time and space. Advertisements are illustrative: they made Coca-Cola into an icon of twentieth-century Dutch life. 17 The same applies to weather reports. In comparison with the total number of articles published in newspapers, accounts of the weather are at least as significant in terms of impact as advertisements. A century of continental isobars made the geographical frames of reference offered by weather reports a household item. More than the political and intellectual narratives on Europe, weather reports occur and recur, influencing collective beliefs consistently and unobtrusively from the bottom up. Given European political developments over the past decade, the impact of official narratives on Europe is clearly not as large as politicians and policymakers would wish.
But there is something about the weather, to paraphrase the seventies' song, that everybody knows. 18 There is yet another reason why weather reports, in whatever medium they are published, are ideal to understand deep-rooted, widely-shared frames of reference: they are dense in terms of information content. These days people tend to check the weather by accessing the internet through apps on mobile phones or a browser on a computer. In both cases, the weather report they find, is either cartographically isolationist, in the sense that it shows little besides the contours of a familiar map of the regional or national state in which the user resides (or to which he or she intends to travel), or it is textually local, in the sense that the report displays a table with data for one very specific location. The abstract space portrayed in an app is usually filled with little  article -artikel suns and clouds and bursts of rain, or overlaid with a satellite image of cloud cover on the move. Weather reports no longer offer an informative spatial framework based on an elementary knowledge of geography. They offer icons that have an immediate bearing on the space where the user is or desires to go to, without the user having to know the coordinates of his or her locationor any other location for that matter. Contemporary weather reports are not so much outward as inward-looking; they do not require a broader spatial framework to make sense.
By contrast, weather reports in historical newspapers tended to require, and to bring about, a higher level of understanding because they spelled out in relative detail the behaviour of meteorological elements over both land masses and seas. To some extent this is a distinction based on different media: the fast-paced, horizontal, highly visual world of cyberspace is epistemologically dissimilar from the sluggish, vertical, textual world of the printing press. As we shall see below, however, weather reports in twentieth-century newspapers were often more detailed than those printed in newspapers today. Moreover, they also frequently focused explicitly on 'Europe' as a conceptually distinct category. As Figure 1 shows, the trigram 19 19 A trigram is a version of 'ngram': a contiguous sequence of three words from a given text, in this case a collection of more than ten million newspaper articles. Figure 1 van eijnatten 'temperature in Europe' occurred in newspapers particularly between 1955 and 1982. Clearly, 'European weather' was an explicit topic in newspapers in this particular period. 20 Although this article's restriction to the period 1950-1990 was made partly out of necessity (see the following discussion on ocr issues), the trigrams make clear that the limitation is also a logical one in terms of the conceptual history of Europe.

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Because weather reports in newspapers occur in very large quantities, running them through a computer is one logical way of making sense of them. The research for this article is based on a collection of newspaper articles publicly accessible through Delpher, a repository of Dutch texts maintained by the National Library of the Netherlands. 21 This article does not include an analysis of the weather maps of Europe printed in the newspapers themselves. These maps could well have been added as a source of data, but there are at least four reasons why they have been excluded. Firstly, they occur much less often than textual reports, as not all texts were accompanied by maps. Secondly, they are less dense in terms of information content, which makes them less meaningful than the textual information. Thirdly, they are far less precise than the texts, offering only a generic, fuzzy view of Europe.
Fourthly, and most crucially, as far as spatial elements are concerned the maps simply reproduce a limited amount of data (commonly a selection of names of towns) that is also present in tabular form in weather reports and forecasts. The decades between 1960 and 1990 were still the heyday of textbased newspapers. These particular maps figured as a support, rather than a substitute, for texts. They primarily visualised isobars, squall lines, wind direction and types of cloud cover; they did not offer a qualitative vision of Europe's spatial texture.
One real problem in the textual dataset is the quality of the bits-andbytes version of the original printed text. Although weather forecasts span the whole twentieth century and a substantial part of the nineteenth, the earlier material is often not usable because of the relatively poor optical character recognition (ocr) -the automatic translation of human-readable texts into machine-readable data. That is in a sense unfortunate, since the level of information in the 1920s seems to have been higher than in the 1960s. On the other hand, the error margins of the ocr in the later reports are considerably lower. The weather report for Monday 11 February 1963 consists of a table of weather conditions, maximum temperatures and rainfall measured at a number of weather stations the day before. The ocr software has generated the originally tabular information in plain text: 20 The trigram is based on a dataset from Delpher that has been corrected for ocr errors. The It is fairly easy to write a script that runs the list of 50,000 locations through thousands and thousands of weather reports. I have used Python, a coding language, to determine frequencies per decade, normalise them (relating all frequencies to a common scale), and generate the results in tabular form. It is far more difficult to plot the extraordinarily rich crop of spatial entities yielded by the texts onto maps. Since visualisations are a crucial but oft-neglected aspect of computer-assisted historical research, I shall briefly discuss the cartographic aspects.

Building maps of Europe
Software packages, most of them commercial, allow us to chart locations 24 , but the greatest flexibility is afforded by writing code that simply superimposes a scatter plot on an appropriate map projection. In this way, the map forms the background to the scatter plot's x and y axes, that is, the longitudes and latitudes. A satisfactory portrayal of Europe is obtained by Mapping areas such as countries or provinces is more difficult than plotting locations. The main technical difficulty involves the fact that areas, in distinction to point-like features such as towns, cannot be indicated on a map merely on the basis of latitudes and longitudes. They require geometrical descriptions of the boundaries encompassing an area. Planes are less easy to handle than points. Mapping areas also raises two specific problems that need to be solved. The two problems concern, first, the changing historical boundaries of territorial entities, and second, the complex relations between different kinds of areas. These may overlap, and do so to varying degrees at different moments in time. In other words, the planes that visualise these areas likewise change over time and intersect in different ways. In the following both problems will be discussed. The reader may find it useful to consult the visualisations included in this article.

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The first problem (historically unstable boundaries) can be addressed by breaking down the larger territorial entities into basic administrative units and then reconstructing them historically. 25 The assumption is that the smaller units themselves demonstrate relative continuity and that recombining them allows us to reconstruct the historical areas to which they once belonged (and in many cases still do). This approach is not always feasible, partly because the territories mentioned in weather reports do not always neatly correspond to political entities. For the period examined here , Germany, for instance, was divided into the ddr and brd, or East Germany and West Germany.
Yet weather reports often just mention 'Germany'. When Germany is mentioned without further specification, it is therefore reconstructed as the sum of ddr and brd. This is relatively simple to do, since the current sixteen states can be recombined easily, three of which (Berlin, Bremen and Hamburg) overlap with cities that bear the same name and can be treated as locations. However, to deconstruct Slovenia and then reconstruct it as part of Yugoslavia about sixty units need to be identified (or even more if municipalities are employed). 26 Rebuilding historical nations is a complicated affair, but it can be done using a detailed database. The advantage of databases is that tables can be The second group of areas consists of regions within countries, such as Normandy in France, Siberia in Russia, the Ukraine in the Soviet Union, or the Po Valley in Italy. A third group includes regions that span two or more countries, such as Scandinavia, Lapland, the British Isles, the Balkans, the Pyrenees or even the Sahara. The fourth category are 'outliers', mostly islands that belong to certain countries but are not necessarily the object of a weather report. Martinique is a French department but it is fairly safe to assume that weather reports mentioning France did not intend to refer also to conditions on that particular Caribbean island.
The advantage of a relational database is that the Azores as an outlier can be mathematically 'subtracted' from Portugal, since weather reports 29 To clarify the difference: in the first instance the frequency count per weather report is either 1 (present) or 0 (not present); I will refer to this method as 'unique' counts. in the second instance the frequency count per weather report is equal to the number of occurrences, which may be 0 or any number higher than 0; I will refer to this method as 'all' counts. Cumulatively the effects of the different ways of counting can be very large.
do not subsume the Atlantic Islands meteorologically under Portugal; and that the French Riviera as a region within a region can be 'added' to France, since a report mentioning that country will normally mean the whole of territorial France, including the Riviera. This allows us to deal with specific mentions of either the Azores or the Riviera, and make them stand out from their respective countries. In working with frequencies, we can take subtractions and additions quite literally. For example, Norway = Scandinavia + Norway, which means that mentions of Norway can be added to mentions of Scandinavia, given that the second implies the first. 27 Likewise, Bavaria = Germany + Bavaria, while Faroe Islands ≠ Denmark + Faroe Islands, since the Faroe Islands are meteorologically distant from mainland Denmark. For practical reasons, the Ionian and Aegean Islands can be more usefully reckoned to mainland Greece, as the Shetland Islands should be to Scotland. Mentions of Corsica (France), Sardinia (Italy), Sicily (Italy), Crete (Greece) and Cyprus (Greece) 28 have been tallied separately (thus Corsica ≠ France + Corsica), since the weather reports themselves tend to set these areas apart.

Mapping weather in De Telegraaf
There are different ways of counting and comparing and therefore of visualising frequencies. Do we want to count only the fact that Garmisch-Partenkirchen occurs in a weather report, treating its presence as either true or false? Or do we want to count all mentions of the German winter resort in a single report? 29 Garmisch-Partenkirchen is unlikely to occur very often in one report, but a region like England may crop up several times. Given the presumed cultural effects of iteration, it follows that the more often England occurs in a weather report, the more likely it will become part of the readers' mental framework. There is also the question of spatial comparisons within periods or across periods. The first method (synchronic comparison) allows us better to differentiate between frequencies within a given period; the second (diachronic comparison) allows us better to understand the development of article -artikel frequencies over a number of periods. For this article all possibilities have been explored, but to avoid repetition only synchronic versions are included in the visualisations.
Since we are interested in the gradual development of patterns over time, generating dynamic maps would be a logical option. Since these are difficult to maintain stable online and to reproduce offline, I have chosen to display the number of hits within specific periods per decade, a time frame that still allows us to draw robust conclusions concerning both continuity and discontinuity. I have also excluded places within the Netherlands and, indeed, the Netherlands itself. Since Dutch newspapers by definition always report on Dutch weather, the inclusion of self-referential material would defeat the purpose of this research. Moreover, Dutch place names occur much more frequently in weather reports than locations outside the Netherlands, so that patterns representing Europe would only be obscured by a surplus of locations irrelevant to the analysis. On the maps, place name labels have been left out for the sake of clarity.
Finally, I have made a close examination of six national and regional newspapers. These are De Telegraaf ('The Telegraph', popular rightwing, 1893-present), Het Vrije Volk ('The Free People ', social-democratic, 1945-1991), De Waarheid ('The Truth ', communist, 1940-1990), Leeuwarder Courant ('Leeuwarden Daily', regional focus on Friesland, 1752-present), Nieuwsblad van het Noorden ('Newspaper for the North', regional focus on Groningen, 1888Groningen, -2002 and Limburgs Dagblad ('Newspaper for Limburg', regional focus on Limburg, 1918-present). The selection is based on the availability of the papers in digitised format for the whole period and on the fact that they represent a substantial cross-section of the Dutch press. De Telegraaf is the newspaper with the largest turnover. For this article only those weather reports were used with an ocr quality sufficient enough for them to be found using a series of weather-related search words, followed by a manual selection. 30 Processing the articles manually was necessary to eliminate incidental articles on the weather covering specific events, such as extreme temperatures or high snowfall that sometimes led to newsworthy accidents or deaths. In all, 46,405 weather reports were investigated. The total number of articles examined per decade, referred to as 'n' on the maps, was used to normalise the frequency counts (see Table 1). From the figures it can correctly be inferred that the Leeuwarder Courant has the highest ocr quality in the dataset.

No of weather reports in dataset (n)
Newspaper 1950-1959 1960-1969 1970-1979 1980-1989  The first series of maps displays the frequency counts for cities, towns and, in some rare cases, villages, in a synchronic overview that accentuates the differences within the decade rather than across several decades. The location map for the 1950s (Figure 2: De Telegraaf, all hits) shows the average number  Figure 2 250-300 weather reports per year that should leave us with 2,500-3,000 reports per decade. The higher numbers for some newspapers implies that weather reports were sometimes divided into more than one instance in the automatic segmentation (tables were labelled separately) or that some newspapers simply contained more than one instance (such as tables and reports, or shorter and longer reports, or reports on Dutch and European weather). Normalising the frequencies eliminates this problem. 33 Nieuwsblad van het Noorden (12-05-1956).
Aberdeen did have an airport.
34 De Telegraaf (11-11-1954). van eijnatten  Figure 10 more if the level of the underlying bin, in this case representing Finland, Sweden or Norway, is exceeded with a sufficiently high frequency score for Scandinavia.
Unlike the location series, the region series shows a clear distinction between tallying methods: regions within regions (like Kent in England) and regions across regions (like the Pyrenees in France and Spain) show up more often when using unique counts. The reason is obvious. 'France' is likely to occur more often in the same weather report than 'Pyrenees'; however, if 'France' and 'Pyrenees' are each counted only once, then 'Pyrenees' will occur more often relative to 'France'. Many details do not appear on the map for all frequencies (although some do: see Figures 10, 11, 12 and 13).  Britain, Germany and the Scandinavian countries, with Russia looming in the background.
In later decades this general pattern does not change; the variation is in the details. In the 1960s there is relatively more Spain, while Greece has become as visible as Italy. The latter two countries develop a greater presence in the 1970s, as do Spain and Portugal. These are obvious tourist destinations.
Switzerland, Austria and the Balkans too come to the fore in later years. This, then, is basically the meteorological extent of Europe in the final decade:

Mapping weather in other newspapers
Given the centralised supply of meteorological information through the knmi, one would not expect much variation between the Dutch newspapers article -artikel used in this research. Indeed, they show exactly the same general pattern, supporting the assumption that newspapers together helped create one dominant geographical frame of reference. But again, there is variation in the details.
All Dutch newspapers used in this research reproduced the tabular information about the meteorological conditions observed at major European weather stations. As time went on, however, Het Vrije Volk more often mentioned less significant places in comparison to the other newspapers ( Figure 14). These places are unremarkable in terms of the number of hits per decade but they were apparently places of interest, locations that witnessed meteorological incidents worth reporting. If such incidents stuck in people's minds, they evidently did so not through repetition but through sheer effect, although it should be borne in mind that what is breath-taking to a professional prognosticator may be less prepossessing to the reader of a morning paper who has just gotten out  than twenty-five millimetres of rainfall in six hours. 38 The pattern of these 'lower order' locations is similar to the general pattern: there are more locations almost everywhere, including Eastern Europe (especially Poland), but the concentration is highest in Britain, France, Germany, Sweden, Spain, Switzerland, Austria and Italy.
One might expect newspapers with left-wing sympathies to report more often on weather conditions in Eastern Europe. Yet that is not the case, at least not in the communist daily De Waarheid (Figure 15).

Figure 15
This may point to a more complex logistics in obtaining information from the other side of the Iron Curtain, but it may also illustrate the There seems to be somewhat more Poland in De Waarheid than in Het Vrije Volk, but the difference is barely noticeable.
The meteorological tale of Europe is thus a monotonous one, and the three regional Dutch newspapers repeat the same story, albeit, once again, with slight variations. Limburgsch Dagblad catered to the southern part of the province of Limburg, which juts out of the Netherlands towards the south, somewhat like an inland peninsula wedged between Belgium and Germany.
In consequence, the newspaper offered a much higher coverage of Belgian weather than any other newspaper, especially in the 1960s. The attention paid to its immediate neighbour stands to reason, since thunderstorms tended to cross southern Limburg on their way from Belgium to Germany. Apart  Nieuwsblad van het Noorden presents yet another variation. It, too, reproduced tables indicating cloud coverage, minimum and maximum article -artikel  Figure 18 temperatures and rainfall for specific places. In this newspaper, the towns normally mentioned in the tables began to overlap with places mentioned in the texts (Figure 18). 42 The tabular order, incidentally, had now become alphabetical where previously it had been geographical, running from the north to the west, south and east (or central). In the course of the 1970s the presence of such tables in this particular paper sharply declined.
Nieuwsblad van het Noorden, however, made a point of mentioning a variety of places in the texts. If we extract from the weather reports only medium-range frequencies (normalized frequencies between 0.004 and 0.014 or absolute frequencies between 10 and 25) we get the following list of places The main reason for this spread of place names in Nieuwsblad van het Noorden was a weather man called Jan Pelleboer , a former knmi employee with a gift for turning reports on the weather into infotainment.
He became quite famous in the Netherlands because of his habit of grading the weather on a scale from one to ten. A long-time freelance contributor to, among others, Nieuwsblad van het Noorden, Pelleboer dispensed with the rather prosaic tabular information and instead wrote readable and meaningful accounts based on his personal selection of the information he obtained. In August 1978, for instance, he observed that warm air is now also being pushed back in Scandinavia, where Stockholm still reached 30 degrees yesterday. The weakest spot with the lowest temperatures and greatest chance of rain lies today, and partially also tomorrow, over Scotland article -artikel and its surroundings, where 13 to 15 degrees have been measured. Aberdeen on the eastern coast this morning had 13 mm. 43 In this particular report the only towns mentioned were Stockholm and Aberdeen. Due to Pelleboer's use of narratives and his ability to add variety to the information available on weather in Europe, the differences between the frequencies of location names in Nieuwsblad van het Noorden is relatively smaller than elsewhere. At the same time, however, the same general pattern emerges.
This applies also to regions mentioned in Nieuwsblad van het Noorden: they show exactly the same pattern.

Discussion
How, then, was Europe framed geographically in the texts of weather reports published in the Dutch newspapers used in this research between 1950 and 1990? We have seen that the reports highlight the northern and western parts of the European continent (including the British Isles as a part of that continent, geographically speaking), as well as bits and pieces towards the south and the centre. England, Scotland, France, Germany and the whole of Scandinavia figure especially prominently; Portugal, Spain and Italy become progressively more prominent in the latter part of the period.
Historians sceptical of digital humanities methods may point out that this pattern is exactly what we would have expected to find. The statement seems plausible, but is it justified? Obviously, readers familiar with Dutch newspapers will have had some sense of the general geographical orientation represented in the media they daily peruse. They would have expected a lot of France and a lot of Germany. But verifying a gut feeling is not quite the same as demonstrating the exact nature of an iterative pattern across multiple newspapers. This, of course, points to the significance of digital humanities methods. Not only do they enjoin upon us the sheer quantity of repetitive information itself, and thus the practical inescapability of mass communication in past and present, they also allow us to determine the mere fact that quite specific patterns emerged in Dutch newspapers over time. From these weather reports a qualitative view of Europe emerges. Parts of Europe matter more than others, meteorologically speaking. Dutch newspaper readers were conditioned by the frequency in which a distinctive geographical framework was reproduced time and again in a recognisable format, not just in one newspaper, but in six (and by extension a lot more). 44 This pattern is not a consequence of fluid 'cultural constructions' that are presumed to 43 Nieuwsblad van het Noorden (3-08-1978 article -artikel the Balkans and Scandinavia were mentioned, not because people travelled there in particularly large quantities, but because the weather there had an effect, whether direct or indirect, on the daily lives of Dutch readers.
Whatever the reasons for the nature of, and the changes and variations in, weather patterns, this article has attempted to show that the weather was responsible for defining a qualitatively detailed conception of Europe that was not, in itself, political. In this sense, this article helps unravel the 'cultural logic' of processes of Europeanisation. One instance of this cultural logic is the rather obvious, perhaps simplistic but nevertheless potent suggestion that the farther the distance an eu member state is to the original core of the European Economic Community, the more peripheral to Europe that country will seem to the people living there. This usually implicit cultural logic is common to narratives on Europe. Weather reports are of course also deeply concerned with proximity, but not in the sense of being at, or close to, a political core.
Belgium, the country closest to the Netherlands in a cultural sense, apart from being a member state of the Benelux, hardly figures in weather reports.
Proximity is important only because of the nearness of, say, a high pressure area affecting the local weather. But cold winds blowing across distant Siberia or a heat wave on the Azores likewise co-determine the perspective on Europe and its surroundings held by Dutch newspaper readers.
Given their enormous popularity, the pervasiveness of print in this period, and the density of information, the effect of post-war weather reports on geographical consciousness can hardly be neglected. Weather reports, however, merely constitute a single case study. The geographical orientation of newspaper readers can (and in due course should) also be gauged by examining the frequency in which different parts of Europe were mentioned in other newspaper rubrics: apart from advertisements in all shapes and sizes, one could make use of items as disparate as news articles and crossword puzzles. Once large-scale historical sentiment mining becomes a real option -the ability to determine affective relations within texts -we will be able to measure the emotional quality territorial entities evoked in the minds of readers.
Moreover, comparisons between weather reports from different regional or national contexts would be a most fruitful way to understand the way Europe figures as a set of varying geographical frameworks, rather than as a single one. A brief examination of the London-based Times for 1970-1973 is telling in this regard. 49 Norway (14.7 hits, normalised), Austria (13.9) and Italy (11.3) are the most commonly mentioned regions in this British newspaper in this period. These are extremely low frequency counts. The top three in De Telegraaf (1970)(1971)(1972)(1973)(1974)(1975)  Germany (430.2) and England (275.3). In other words, weather reports in the