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.
Authors: Estelle Bunout and Frédéric Clavert, C²DH, Luxembourg University, Esch-sur-Alzette; Maud Ehrmann, DHLAB, EPFL, Lausanne, Suisse.
The book is available in Open Access: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110729214/html
The series "Digital History and Hermeneutics" addresses key questions for historians in the digital age:
- how do digital infrastructures and technologies interfere in our practices of thinking, doing, and narrating history?
- what are the methodological and epistemological implications of using digital data and tools for historical interpretation and argumentation?
- what new historical questions can be asked when exploring the big data of the past?
In offering a platform for cutting edge scholarship in the emerging field of digital history and hermeneutics, the series aims at making a critical intervention in the field of digital humanities and introducing key debates and concepts of digital history to the historical community at large.
