The CHINED network was founded by Nicholas Brownlees (University of Florence) who organised the first CHINED conference in 2004. Since then, CHINED conferences have been regular events and have provided a forum for the communication and discussion of research into the discourse of historical news texts written in the English language. In this primary objective the focus is on the linguistic analysis of specific publication types and genres traditionally associated with the domain of news, such as ballads, pamphlets, newspapers, magazines, correspondence, histories, annals, etc.
However, as a secondary objective, CHINED is also interested in the possibility of opening up the scholarly debate on historical news to incorporate news discourse from other languages. As with English news texts, the study of such texts should focus on news discourse strategies relating, for example, to the fields of media discourse, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, history of the language, stylistics and other related linguistic disciplines. We are strong believers in the value and significance of interdisciplinary studies – hence our interest in involving news historians in our research.
Prestigious European universities have hosted the conference: Florence, Zurich, Rostock, Helsinki, Porto (Fernando Pessoa), Sheffield, Barcelona (Pompeu Fabra), Augsburg. Their scholarly contribution to the study of specialised discourses of the past has been immense as several ground-breaking publications in the field of historical pragmatics and historical discourse analysis show.