Digitised Newspapers – A New Eldorado for Historians?

Reflections on Tools, Methods and Epistemology

Estelle Bunout, Maud Ehrmann, Frédéric Clavert, Estelle Bunout, Maud Ehrmann, Frédéric Clavert

• Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9783110729269
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The application of digital technologies to historical newspapers has changed the research landscape historians were used to. An Eldorado? Despite undeniable advantages, the new digital affordance of historical newspapers also transforms research practices and confronts historians with new challenges. Drawing on a growing community of practices, the impresso project invited scholars experienced with digitised newspaper collections with the aim of encouraging a discussion on heuristics, source criticism and interpretation of digitized newspapers.

This volume provides a snapshot of current research on the subject and offers three perspectives: how digitisation is transforming access to and exploration of historical newspaper collections; how automatic content processing allows for the creation of new layers of information; and, finally, what analyses this enhanced material opens up.

' impresso - Media Monitoring of the Past' is an interdisciplinary research project that applies text mining tools to digitised historical newspapers and integrates the resulting data into historical research workflows by means of a newly developed user interface. The question of how best to adapt text mining tools and their use by humanities researchers is at the heart of the impresso enterprise.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Digitised Historical Newspapers: A Changing Research Landscape Introduction
• The Allure of Digitised Newspapers: Prospecting the Eldorado
• Unearthing New Artefacts: Digital Reshaping of Newspapers
• Mining Digitised Newspapers: Source Criticism and the Making of (Digital) History