The large-scale digitisation of newspapers over the past decade has facilitated access to newspaper collections but also raised a series of issues for both libraries and users, and more specifically researchers: What does it mean to work in new ways with the traditional historical sources that are newspapers?
The large-scale digitisation of newspapers over the past decade has facilitated access to newspaper collections but also raised a series of issues for both libraries and users, and more specifically researchers: What does it mean to work in new ways with the traditional historical sources that are newspapers? How does the formal transformation of this source from analogue, microfilm and paper collections to digital ones affect research practices and questions?
From manual, on-site exploration of microfilm or paper collections to online keyword search over millions of OCRized pages, the way we access to digitised newspapers collections has changed significantly. Besides, digitized sources also lend themselves to further enrichment via text and image processing (e.g. automatic recognition of proper names via named entity processing) and a whole world of new possibilities is opening up with respect to the way historians collect and engage with their research corpora.
An Eldorado? Despite undeniable merits, the digital transformation and the new affordance of historical newspapers via interfaces also brings some drawbacks and possible pitfalls which need to be carefully assessed. These include the noise introduced by automatic recognition of text and document structures (OCR and OLR): what can be searched is not exactly what was printed. Furthermore, full-text search takes readers directly from keywords to articles. It creates a tunnel leading from the list of results to the individual article, concealing the surrounding articles and the context of each press title.
At the same time, such interfaces can contextualise historical sources in new ways and can potentially display and link information on both newspapers themselves and their content. The possibility to download massive collections of text changes the way in which researchers collect and engage with their research corpora, for instance with the application of text mining tools such as topic modelling. But to which extent does it transform the heuristics of historical research?
We invite scholars who are experienced users of online swiss and international collections of digitised newspapers (such as impresso, E-newspaperarchives.ch, Delpher, Scriptorium, or AustriaN Newspapers Online (ANNO), the British Newspaper Archive, Europeana and Gallica), to share their research practices, experiences and outcomes. Our goal is to start a conversation about heuristics, source criticism and interpretation for digitised newspapers in particular and digitised historical sources in general.
This conference is being held in connection with the project “impresso: Media monitoring of the past. Mining 200 years of historical newspapers”, which aims at enabling critical text mining of newspaper archives with the implementation of a technological framework to extract, process, link, and explore information from print media archives. An interface giving access to the semantically enriched content of Swiss and Luxembourgish newspapers is under development.
The conference will be held on the 23-24 April 2020 in Lausanne, in English. Proposals can however be sent in English, French and German (deadline: 15.09.2019). The full papers will have to be submitted before the conference. After the conference, participants will be invited to submit their conference-paper for publication in an edited book on the epistemology of digital history, published by De Gruyter.
Scientific committee:
Estelle Bunout (University of Luxembourg)
Frédéric Clavert (University of Luxembourg)
Simon Clematide (University of Zurich)
Marten Düring (University of Luxembourg)
Maud Ehrmann (École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL))
Martin Grandjean (University of Lausanne)
Caroline Muller (Université Rennes 2)
Enrico Natale (infoclio.ch)
Matteo Romanello (EPFL)
Raphaëlle Ruppen Coutaz (University of Lausanne)
François Vallotton (University of Lausanne)