Abstract
A measure of which newspapers are the most influential is an important foundation for any large-scale study of newspapers. A reliable measure of significance would allow studies to more strongly weigh articles in more influential papers. In this article, we use digital methods to create a partial citation index of a range of Dutch newspapers with a national circulation published in the period from 1920 to 1939. We find that using the digital archive of the National Library of the Netherlands (available through Delpher) enables us to find citations, but the problems of digitization make it impossible to create any index approaching comprehensiveness. Because source criticism – a crucial part of studying history – is made more difficult by digitization, it merits special notice in the digital age.
Highlights
Source criticism is a central part of writing history
We find that using the digital archive of the National Library of the Netherlands enables us to find citations, but the problems of digitization make it impossible to create any index approaching comprehensiveness
In order to enable researchers to better evaluate their results from digital searches, we propose to create a citation index for newspapers
Summary
Source criticism is a central part of writing history. Digital archives make such analysis even more crucial because search engines imply that all of the documents that they display are equal. We use other tools to try to overcome the problems that we encountered in our first searches as well as to better understand our results Chief among these is Texcavator, a tool for large-scale text mining developed at the universities of Utrecht and Amsterdam. The use of this tool improves our results, but not to such an extent that they meet the standards for a comprehensive citation index. This raises questions with regard to the use of digital newspaper databases in historical research, which we address in our conclusion
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