Abstract
This article considers the interdisciplinary opportunities and challenges of working with digital cultural heritage, such as digitized historical newspapers, and proposes an integrated digital hermeneutics workflow to combine purely disciplinary research approaches from computer science, humanities, and library work. Common interests and motivations of the above‐mentioned disciplines have resulted in interdisciplinary projects and collaborations such as the NewsEye project, which is working on novel solutions on how digital heritage data is (re)searched, accessed, used, and analyzed. We argue that collaborations of different disciplines can benefit from a good understanding of the workflows and traditions of each of the disciplines involved but must find integrated approaches to successfully exploit the full potential of digitized sources. The paper is furthermore providing an insight into digital tools, methods, and hermeneutics in action, showing that integrated interdisciplinary research needs to build something in between the disciplines while respecting and understanding each other's expertise and expectations.
Highlights
Never before have collections of historical newspapers been so accessible to the public, a result preceded by a digitization process that has been ongoing for decades
Researchers from all disciplines within the NewsEye project are bonded by a shared interest in digital historical newspapers and a willingness to engage in collaborative research and method development
We developed a workflow view to our project, and eventually a digital hermeneutics workflow as a model for integrated interdisciplinary research on historical newspapers
Summary
Never before have collections of historical newspapers been so accessible to the public, a result preceded by a digitization process that has been ongoing for decades. With the Europeana newspapers thematic collection, there is a panEuropean newspaper portal available, giving access to 18 million newspaper pages of which 10 million pages were converted to full text.1 As this process of digitization continues, increasingly advanced techniques from the field of natural language processing (NLP) promise to optimize the historians' access to full-text archives (Ehrmann et al, 2019). For the promise to come true, disciplinary research approaches from libraries, humanities, and computer science need to be replaced by interdisciplinary ones For the libraries, these developments are a significant advantage for reaching their core missions: preserving the originals, providing access services, and striving for the best possible interaction between users, information, and knowledge (Van den Bosch et al, 2009; Zhang et al, 2015)
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