Life Writes Its Own Stories: The value and research benefits gained from digitised newspaper

Professor Simon Tanner
King’s College London
@SimonTanner #text2data
Life Writes Its
Own Stories:
The value &
research benefits
gained from
digitised
newspaper

@SimonTanner
 Digital Humanities @kingsdh
 Value, Knowledge & memory
institutions
 Newspapers and value
 Digitised newspapers
 Examples of benefits
 Challenges and next steps
Presentation is here: www.slideshare.net/KDCS
Wie das Leben so schreibt
“Life writes its own stories“
or “As life writes“
#text2data

@SimonTanner
King’s Department of Digital Humanities @kingsdh
www.kcl.ac.uk/ddh
30+ years of activity, against a background of rapid
innovation and change in Humanities Computing and Digital
Humanities.
~550 students in 5 x Masters + 1 x Undergraduate degrees
30+ academic faculty plus researchers and teaching fellows
Digital Humanities at King’s

@SimonTanner
King’s Digital Labs @kingsdigitallab
www.kdl.kcl.ac.uk
Established 2015
14+ staff: Directors, Project Manager, Analysts, Software
Engineer, UI/UX Designers, Developers, Systems Manager,
Post-doc.
100 inherited projects, 20 ongoing. ~5 million digital objects.
Supported by external funding, under-written internally.
Digital Humanities at Large Scale

@SimonTanner
Many strengths coming together
Highly innovative
Collaborations
For scholars
For the people
Working with
Libraries
Museums
Archives
Publishing
Media
Transformative

@SimonTanner
‘Memory institutions’ as a collective phrase for libraries, museums
and archives dates back at least to 1994 with first usage attributed to
Swedish information scientist Roland Hjerppe.
By using the phrase ‘memory institution’ I am assuming a common
aspiration across multiple sectors in preserving, organizing and
making available the cultural and intellectual records of their
societies. It also reflects the confluence with the growth in digital.
A wider variety of organisations, such as schools, universities, media corporations, government or
religious bodies could also legitimately be ascribed this title. For instance, the British Broadcasting
Company; a University Press; or the Wayback Machine and the Internet Archive would fit the definition
as well.
Memory Institutions

@SimonTanner
Social, economic and intrinsic values are claimed in straplines:
 All the News That's Fit to Print - The New York Times
 The daily diary of the American dream - The Wall Street Journal
 The Sowetan, South Africa's daily newspaper with slogans such as
Power your Future or Sowetan. Building the Nation
Newspaper straplines claim values

@SimonTanner
A sense of place and community are also claimed in straplines:
 It’s Where You Live - The Toronto Star
 As Waikato As It Gets - New Zealand’s Waikato Times
 If You Don't Want It Printed, Don't Let It Happen - Aspen Daily
News

@SimonTanner
Some newspapers speak to education or knowledge:
 Your right to know. A new voice for a new Pakistan - Daily Times,
Pakistan
 There's nothing more valuable than knowledge - Cape Times
 The Guardian. Think... – The Guardian British daily newspaper

@SimonTanner
Sometimes we might not like those values…
(with thanks to Tim Sheratt)

@SimonTanner
Existence / Prestige
Utility
Inheritance / Legacy
Modes of Digital Value
Education
Community
Balanced Value Impact Model. See: http://simon-tanner.blogspot.com/2017/10/BVI-Model-V2.html

@SimonTanner
 The Library of Congress Historic American Newspapers site:
154,205 titles with 12 million pages searchable newspaper
 The British Newspaper Archive is showing >20 million pages
 Trove in Australia provides access to over 20 million pages from
over 1000 Australian newspapers + mass crowdsourcing
 The National Library of Turkey is unique for having digitized its
entire collection of 800,000 pages and 845 titles.
Nineteenth-century media expert, Jim Mussell, thinks of ‘the aura of old
newspapers in hard copy and what happens when this is remediated digitally…
Digitization returns newspapers to us, but differently’
Mussell, J., 2013. Parsing Passing Events. jimmussell.com A blog about the Victorians, the media and the digital
humanities. Available at: http://jimmussell.com/2013/03/13/parsing-passing-events/ [Accessed June 30, 2017].
(some) Digitised Newspapers

@SimonTanner
Digitized collections are only a fragment of the newspapers available.
The European Newspaper Survey Report states: "Only 12 (26%) of the
libraries had digitized more than 10% of their collection (either in
terms of titles or page numbers), and only two of those had done
more than 50%.”
In the British Library alone there are approximately 450 million pages
of printed material with roughly 20 million pages digitized.
The BL Heritage Made Digital will add a further 1.3m pages from
c.180 newspaper titles by March 2020 plus open data-sets.
https://blogs.bl.uk/thenewsroom/2019/01/heritage-made-digital-the-newspapers.html
Only scratching the surface?

@SimonTanner
Obvious benefits of digitised newspapers to libraries are:
 providing enhanced access to information,
 more opportunities to ask sophisticated research questions,
 long term retention of sustainable digital resources,
 honouring the legacy and prestige of the library collection, and
 increased engagement with the public record and memory
institutions by their communities.
Benefits and challenges

@SimonTanner
Digitised newspaper are popular and impactful digitization projects:
 Reaching out to refresh the audience for these materials
 Delivering community and social benefits
 Better informed sense of place, history and community
 Used in schools and for life long learners
 Of great interest to local and family historians.
For academics they ‘fill a gap for content that is not found elsewhere’
(Paul Gooding)
Benefits and challenges

Newspaper digitization has produced >22 million pages since 2010.
Available online at https://tidningar.kb.se
Swedish Newspapers
http://simon-tanner.blogspot.com/2013/03/world-class-digitisation-in-sweden.html

Arcadia Foundation has awarded SEK 30 million ($3.5 million) to
the National Library of Sweden to digitize Swedish historical out of
copyright newspapers.
The Library is making available for free online the complete collection
of Swedish newspaper
titles from the
17th century to 1906:
-1,200 newspaper titles,
and up to
3 million pages in total.
Swedish Newspapers

@SimonTanner
A sense of place & history

Welsh Newspapers
https://newspapers.library.wales/

Education and special interests
A huge number and range of special interest communities that are
served. For instance:
drama, music, poetry, sport, religion,
science, engineering, food,
diaspora and language perspectives
Opportunities to:
 solidify a sense of place and time
 a personalized narrative and history
 heavily used in schools
 and for life long learning

Open API’s enable the unexpected
https://www.newseye.eu/case-studies/case-study-1-
return-migration-between-1850-and-1950/
https://glam-workbench.github.io/trove-newspapers/

What do academics want?
Source: https://www.newseye.eu/blog/news/online-research-of-digital-newspapers-of-three-
national-libraries-a-survey-by-sarah-oberbichler-stef/
NewsEye – Survey of Austrian participants in online research of
digital newspapers of three national libraries.

50
60
70
80
90
100
1801
1810
1820
1830
1840
1850
1860
1870
1880
1890
1900
characters words
words with capital letter start significant words
Poly. (characters) Poly. (words)
Poly. (significant words) Poly. (words with capital letter start)
BL Newspaper OCR accuracy
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july09/munoz/07munoz.html

Opening Access vs Unfunded Mandates
“What do scholars want?”
Whether we work with digital or paper-based resources
our basic needs are the same.
We all want our cultural record to be comprehensive, stable, and accessible.
And we all want to be able to augment that record with our own contributions.”
Jerome McGann, Sustainability: the Elephant in the Room.
Paper for the 2010 Conference, Digital Humanities Scholarship: The Shape of Things to Come, University of Virginia.

What do I (a scholar) want? Next steps
 Better citation of digitized newspaper by academics
 Easier to cite stable and shorter permanent URL’s needed for
digitized newspapers
 More variant editions available in digital format with more regional
content
 Better OCR accuracy to enable text data mining & search accuracy
 More collections Open Access accessible
 More collections accessible with Open API’s or open downloadable
data-sets
 More in greyscale/colour. Or colour for illustrated editions at least

Professor Simon Tanner
King’s College London
@SimonTanner
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Life Writes Its Own Stories: The value and research benefits gained from digitised newspaper

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