Digitised Newspapers A New Eldorado For Historians

The application of digital technologies to historical newspapers have 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.

Digitization technologies applied to historical newspapers have changed the research landscape historians were used to. An Eldorado? Despite unquestionable merits, the new digital affordance of historical newspapers also brings drawbacks and possibl

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.

The second issue of the yearbook History of Intellectual Culture (HIC) dedicates a thematic section to modes of publication. This volume addresses recent advances in publication studies and stresses the cultural formation of knowledge. By exploring and analyzing layers of presenting, sharing, and circulating knowledge, we invite readers to critically engage with questions of media uses and publishing practices and structures, both historically and in our contemporary digital age. The articles in this volume attest to the great variety of publication modes and perspectives, from the potential and limits of digitizing newspapers such as the New York Times to questions of positionality in building and using Wikipedia, from translation policies and female participation to the genre of university histories.

Despite a variety of theoretical and practical undertakings, there is no coherent understanding of the concept of scale in digital history and humanities, and its potential is largely unexplored. A clearer picture of the whole spectrum is needed, from large to small, distant to close, global to local, general to specific, macro to micro, and the in-between levels. The book addresses these issues and sketches out the territory of Zoomland, at scale. Four regions and sixteen chapters are conceptually and symbolically depicted through three perspectives: bird's eye, overhead, and ground view. The variable-scale representation allows for exploratory paths covering areas such as: theoretical and applicative reflections on scale combining a digital dimension with research in history, media studies, cultural heritage, literature, text analysis, and map modelling; creative use of scale in new digital forms of analysis, data organisation, interfaces, and argumentative or artistic expressions. Zoomland provides a systematic discussion on the epistemological dimensions, hermeneutic methods, empirical tools, and aesthetic logic pertaining to scale and its innovative possibilities residing in humanities-based approaches and digital technologies.

This history of early modern news focuses on news itself rather than specific material forms. Centering on movement through different media, time, and place, it makes the case for a truly comparative, pan-European history of news. After the Introduction, the second section, News Moves, explores how we think about and research news culture and news communication, demonstrating movement is more important than static forms. The third, News Sings, focuses on news ballads, comparing actors, publics, music, and soundscapes of ballad singing in several European cities, highlighting the central role of immaterial elements, such as sound, music and voice. The fourth, News Counts, argues that seeing news the way a machine might read it—through its metadata—is one way of moving beyond form, allowing us to find surprising commonalities in news cultures which differ greatly in both time and place.

7 Conclusion: where we're going, we'll still need Ranganathan -- Introduction -- Access to digitised library collections -- Recommendations -- The stakes for digitised collections -- Summary: library digitisation as a public service -- Index