Digital Newspaper Archives Research Articles

Impressos periódicos e escrita da história

The printed periodicals attract the attention of a highly diversified array of scholars, owing to the myriad possibilities they offer as sources of information and/or subjects of research. The aim of this article is to discuss the challenges posed by the utilization of this type of source for historical writing in the current context, characterized by the availability of vast quantities of titles in digital format. The discussion begins with the systematization of a set of procedures and methods already well-established concerning the use of such sources, followed by an exploration of the potential impacts of digital newspaper archives on historiographical practice. The shifts in terms of conception and execution of research invite critical reflection on the new analytical possibilities brought about by the transition from analog to digital.

Planning-Related Protest as a Key to Understanding Urban Particularities

Planning-related protest is a “normal” and strategic form of political participation that manifests cause-related conflict and criticises dominant norms, situations, and institutions. It goes beyond the participation offered by the (local) state while claiming action by the state and other powerful actors. Given the multitude of such protests as well as the usually local and, therefore, often small-scale causes and claims articulated, we consider these actions by citizens as everyday practices. On the other hand, protest and movement theory has focused on structural aspects like resource mobilisation and opportunity structures. We, therefore, suggest that planning protest is one of the keys to understanding the particular, place-specific characteristics that make every city unique. Protest data mining as a newly developed method to identify planning protests in local databases, digital newspaper archives, and petition platforms in a standardised approach has produced datasets of hundreds of protests that allow for comparisons between cities. The exemplary analysis of this data allows us to discuss the structural dimension of everyday action.

‘The people, too, can be consumers’: debating French consumer citizenship in the ‘Age of Revolution’ (c. 1830–c. 1848)

ABSTRACT This paper presents an investigation into parliamentary debates on consumer citizenship in early nineteenth-century France. This contribution aims to chart the competing political visions that emerged during the Age of Revolution negotiating the coming-of-age of (urban) France as a consumerist society with notions of citizenship, the common good and patriotic sentiments. By looking at two distinct moments of regime change i.e. 1830 and 1848, this paper features a comparison of how MPs and political elites perceived consumer behaviour, its social, economic and cultural effects and its desirability in different political constellations ranging from monarchical to republican. By consulting digital newspaper archives and critically using search terms on this large body of text, a historical discourse analysis of parliamentary speeches on how to align citizenship and consumption was effected that carefully reconstructs the ideological rifts and social dynamics characterizing the political life of the era.

Media reporting of suicide in the bengaluru E-edition of three major indian dailies: An archival study.

India has the world's largest newspaper market, with over 100 million copies sold daily. The media scapegoat, simplify, speculate, and sensationalize suicide-related news instead of signposting people to seek help. Suicide affects individuals, families, and communities and is worthy of responsible reporting. This study examined the quality of newspaper coverage of suicides from January to December 2017 in three popular English dailies in Bengaluru, South India. Three hundred and ninety-five online suicide reports were evaluated for compliance with the 2017 WHO recommendations for responsible suicide reporting by media professionals. The secondary data were obtained from digital newspaper archives and analyzed. A handful of the sampled articles met key recommendations. While reporting on suicide in the Indian media, three critical areas that require the most attention are reducing sensationalism, providing help-seeking information, and educating the public on suicide prevention without perpetuating myths.

Comparative Search in Digital Newspaper and Audiovisual Archives: Six Methodological Issues and Some Practical Solutions

Comparative Search in Digital Newspaper and Audiovisual Archives: Six Methodological Issues and Some Practical Solutions

Leopardi nas Crónicas Jornalísticas Brasileiras de 1881 a 1916

The crônica is a literary genre that became widespread in Brazilian newspapers and magazines pages in the 19th century. These short pieces were responsible for the circulation and insertion of foreign writers in the Brazilian cultural system, such as the Italian writer Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837). The present article analyses, based on Cultural Translation Theory (Burke/Hsia 2009), how Leopardi was represented in Brazilian crônicas published between the end of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, specifically from 1881 to 1916, and available at the Brazilian Digital Newspaper Archive. The analysis of 12 crônicas shows that they were written predominantly by men, and published in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo; these cronistas tend to show Leopardi as poet, “translating” and resignifying his “patriotism”, and, mainly, his “pessimist philosophy”, following sectors of the Italian criticism of the time. Furthermore, they exert a double function in the process of cultural translation, filling in thematic gaps and spreading Leopardi’s works.

La circulación de saberes y el problema de la autoría en la prensa virreinal. Un análisis del Correo de Comercio, 1810-1811

Los libros y periódicos españoles, que circularon en Buenos Aires a principios del siglo XIX, fueron utilizados por los editores de la prensa porteña como insumos para la gestión de contenidos. Los textos publicados en España fueron leídos para ser transcriptos o reescritos, sin que se mencionara la fuente de origen en la prensa tardocolonial porteña. La falta de mención autoral en los textos supo llevar al equívoco de creer que pertenecía su autoría a quien se consideraba el editor del periódico. El análisis comparativo, realizado gracias a la digitalización de las fuentes impresas españolas por la Hemeroteca Digital de la Biblioteca Nacional de España, permitió hallar las correspondencias entre las fuentes publicadas en España y el periódico porteño Correo de Comercio (1810-1811). Se hallaron textos en el periódico, que durante más de cien años fueron atribuidos a Manuel Belgrano, que habían sido traducidos en España de autores franceses como Veron Duverger de Forbonnais. El análisis de la autoría en el siglo XVIII y principios del XIX en el ámbito cultural hispánico permitió explicar la apropiación de textos ajenos, porque se buscaba favorecer la circulación de las ideas para el fomento del bien común.

El conflicto entre el derecho al olvido digital del pasado penal y las libertades informativas: las hemerotecas digitales. (A propósito de la STC de 4 de junio de 2018 y de la STEDH de 28 de junio de 2018, caso M.L. y W.W. contra Alemania)

Con carácter general, la libertad de información es uno de los límites del derecho al olvido digital. La posibilidad de localizar, en la hemeroteca digital de un periódico, una noticia publicada tiempo atrás, utilizando como criterios de búsqueda datos personales, concretamente los nombres y apellidos ha sido el motivo del pronunciamiento del TC. En este supuesto concreto, el derecho al olvido digital lleva aparejada la existencia de un perjuicio para el interesado, tratándose de un aspecto de su vida privada relativo a su pasado penal y por tanto relacionado, con su intimidad. El presente trabajo analiza la STC, de 4 de junio de 2018, que reconoce expresamente el denominado jurisprudencialmente derecho al olvido digital, como una facultad inherente al derecho a la protección de datos personales, y, por lo tanto, como derecho fundamental. Paralelamente examina la STEDH caso M.L. y W.W. contra Alemania de 28 de junio de 2018. En el conflicto entre el derecho al olvido digital del pasado penal y el ejercicio de la libertad de información a través de las hemerotecas digitales, el TC emplea los mismos parámetros que ha venido utilizando en su jurisprudencia tradicional sobre los límites a la libertad de información junto con el paso del tiempo y los efectos de la digitalización de la información. Para concluir que la medida limitadora consistente en desindexar los nombres y apellidos como criterios de búsqueda era proporcionada. No obstante, las hemerotecas digitales, contribuyen de forma sustancial a la preservación y accesibilidad de las noticias y la información. La STC resulta, en este sentido, más garantista para los derechos de la personalidad, y, en especial, para el derecho fundamental a la protección de datos. Sin embargo, el interés de los usuarios de Internet en disponer de la información sobre hechos del pasado queda desvalorizado en la ponderación. Por el contrario, la postura que ha mantenido el TEDH es que la inclusión del nombre de la persona noticiable constituye un aspecto esencial del trabajo de la prensa y de la credibilidad de la noticia, máxime si se trata como en este caso de un procedimiento penal. No resultaría por tanto improbable que el caso español acabara planteándose ante TEDH sobre la base de la importancia del derecho del público a acceder a la información incluso sobre acontecimientos pasados.

German surveillance of the Swedish film market during World War II

This article approaches the subject of German film policy in Sweden during World War II from a new perspective. While several film scholars have mapped the connections between the German and Swedish film industries in the past, less is known about the German surveillance of Swedish film criticism, Swedish cinema audiences and Allied newsreel competitors. Drawing on previously overlooked archival material from the German film company Ufa’s Swedish subsidiary, digital newspaper archives and previous research on German film strategies abroad, this article offers new insights into the ways Ufa monitored the film market in neutral Sweden.

Exploring Machine Learning to Study the Long-Term Transformation of News

The labour-intensive nature of manual content analysis and the problematic accessibility of source material make quantitative analyses of news content still scarce in journalism history. However, the digitization of newspaper archives now allows for innovative digital methods for systematic longitudinal research beyond the scope of incidental case studies. We argue that supervised machine learning offers promising approaches to analyse abundant source material, ground analyses in big data, and map the structural transformation of journalistic discourse longitudinally. By automatically analysing form and style conventions, that reflect underlying professional norms and practices, the structure of news coverage can be studied more closely. However, automatically classifying latent and period-specific coding categories is highly complex. The structure of digital newspaper archives (e.g. segmentation, OCR) complicates this even more, while machine learning algorithms are often a black box. This paper shows how making classification processes transparent enables journalism scholars to employ these computational methods in a reliable and valid way. We illustrate this by focusing on the issues we encountered with automatically classifying news genres, an illuminating but particularly complex coding category. Ultimately, such an approach could foster a revision of journalism history, particularly the often hypothesized but understudied shift from opinion-based to fact-centred reporting.

Nooit meer bladeren? Digitale krantenarchieven als bron

Marcel Broersma No More Pages to Turn? Digital Newspaper Archives as Source This article analyzes the methodological challenges and the opportunities for future research that are triggered by the rising availability of large databases of digitalized historical newspapers. It argues that these are new sources that differ fundamentally from their analogue equivalents. Media historians have to be aware of the methodological problems that occur when analogue papers are transformed into digital objects. Especially searching digital data with key words is challenging. This implicates that scholars have to make their search strategies explicit and have to be transparent about their methodology. Moreover, it is argued that digitalized newspapers should not be used (solely) for ‘cherry picking’: the eclectic search for quotations that illustrate and liven up a historical argument. Instead newspapers should be considered a serial source that should be studied systematically. The availability of digitized newspapers could so encourage the study and the development of new methodologies for analysing newspaper content.

Lost and Now Found: The Search for the Hidden and Forgotten

Lost and Now Found: The Search for the Hidden and Forgotten

Lux In Arcana: Decoding the Right to Be Forgotten in Digital Archives

On 13 May 2014, the European Court of Justice ruled that search engines such as Google had a duty to respect EU citizens’ right to be forgotten. That is, the search engines—deemed “controllers” of information under the Directive—were obligated in some circumstances to remove or de-list links from search results that pertain to information that infringes on an individual’s rights under the Directive. In the fall of 2015, the Spanish Supreme Court found itself obligated to determine the application of the digital right to be forgotten in a different context: This time in a digital newspaper archive. However, since the right to be forgotten is purely judicially-created and not yet memorialized in a regulation (other than through judicial interpretations of the European Directive 1995/46/EC of the European Parliament and Council of 24 October on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data), it is therefore appropriate to analyze Spain’s recent Supreme Court ruling as an indicator of the future of the right. What does this decision mean for the future of the right to be forgotten?

Looking for The Illustrated London News in Australian Digital Newspapers

This article will demonstrate that digital newspaper archives can be used to shed new light on the historical readership of nineteenth-century newspapers and magazines. The digital newspaper archive of Australia (Trove) was used to study the distribution and reception of the renowned Illustrated London News (ILN) in the Australian colonies between 1842 and 1872. As a result of this research, this article shows that around 17,000 copies of the magazine reached the Australian colonies by each mail in 1862. This corresponds to 8–11% of the total circulation of the ILN at that time so making it the most widely read British publication in the Australian colonies. By means of a case study into the colonial readership of the ILN, this article will argue that the magazine was an important building block in the formation of the imagined communities both of Britain and its dominions in the period between 1842 and 1872.

The Cultural-historical Value of and Problems with Digitized Advertisements. Historical Newspapers and the Portable Radio, 1950-1969

This article demonstrates how a digital newspaper archive such as Delpher offers new possibilities to do justice to the value of newspaper advertisements when conducting historical research. A case study into the way advertisements tried to cater to youngsters in portable radio advertisements (1950-1969) will illuminate how distant, semi-distant, and close reading can further historical enquiry. This case study, at the same time, reveals a major shortcoming of these digitized advertisements, namely the way they are currently indexed – classified advertisements in particular. The article offers two computational approaches that will result in a more fine-grained indexation, and urges the National Library of the Netherlands to experiment with these approaches as well as with crowd sourcing. Only after these measures have been taken will researchers be able to use the full potential of advertisements on Delpher’s newspapers.

Nooit meer bladeren? Digitale krantenarchieven als bron

Marcel Broersma <em>No More Pages to Turn? Digital Newspaper Archives as Source</em> This article analyzes the methodological challenges and the opportunities for future research that are triggered by the rising availability of large databases of digitalized historical newspapers. It argues that these are new sources that differ fundamentally from their analogue equivalents. Media historians have to be aware of the methodological problems that occur when analogue papers are transformed into digital objects. Especially searching digital data with key words is challenging. This implicates that scholars have to make their search strategies explicit and have to be transparent about their methodology. Moreover, it is argued that digitalized newspapers should not be used (solely) for ‘cherry picking’: the eclectic search for quotations that illustrate and liven up a historical argument. Instead newspapers should be considered a serial source that should be studied systematically. The availability of digitized newspapers could so encourage the study and the development of new methodologies for analysing newspaper content.

Problems and possibilities of digital newspaper and periodical archives

Digital newspaper archives are the most widely used resource for digital humanities research. The basic functionality of these archives – the ability to perform keyword searches across multiple titles – is unlikely to change. This means that researchers can safely develop a digital methodology without having to fear that new technology will make their efforts obsolete. On the basis of this observation, this article discusses three methodological problems of the digital newspaper archive. First, it provides unequal access to both different scholars and historical periods. Second, it tends to ignore the historical form of media landscapes. Third, the digital mediation of newspapers and periodicals results in a problematic loss of context. This article proposes that the solution to these problems lies in the assertion of agency over the digital newspaper archive and in the debates surrounding them by researchers. They should see digital newspaper archive as any other paper archive: with its own possibilities and limitations, which can be adjusted by the researcher.

A Survey of Online Digital Newspaper and Genealogy Archives: Resources, Cost, and Access

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Archiving the Visual

That technologies often govern the realm of possible research is a reality of the historian's enterprise. Although much attention has been paid to considering both the promises and pitfalls of newspaper digitization—specifically the increased speed with which searches can be conducted and archives culled for information alongside the drawbacks of proprietary databases and software—these are not the only transformations to the research-scape. Using her research examining news coverage of the controversial 1985 bombing of the MOVE1 house in Philadelphia, PA as a case study, the author explores the challenges of using digital newspaper archives that configure articles as plain text rather than as image files. The author considers how the absence of visuals, specifically photographs, from such databases complicates the work of media historians. Such databases, the author argues, stifle the otherwise productive communicative tension between ‘seeing and saying.’

Introduction to Pierrot at the Cinema Part III

Carlo Piccardi has demonstrated the connection between the music for pantomime and both silent and sound film. In the first two parts published in MaMI Vol. 1, no. 2 and MaMI Vol.2, no.2 “Pierrot at the Cinema” cites a number of critics whose comments about the relationship between music, mood and physical gesture in the silent film era are still relevant today to scholars and film composers. In this part he discusses the music for pantomimes that were made into films and what happened to the music in the transformation from one genre to the other. Sometimes the necessity to follow the screen action caused the music to become exceedingly linear, a slave to the image. It could even lose its internal logic. Often, however, talented composers came up with musical solutions that caught the physical gestures and moods on screen, and, while writing good “action” music, they developed an overarching musical logic as well. Piccardi discusses Andre Wormser’s score for both the pantomime and film versions of L’Enfant Prodigue, Pasquale Mario Costa’s score for the pantomime and film versions of L’histoire d’un Pierrot, Fernand le Borne’s film pantomime L’empreinte, Engelbert Humperdinck’s music for Das Mirakel, Arnold Schoenberg’s Die gluckliche Hand, Richard Strauss’ Josephs Legende and Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Pierrot au cinema. The variety of musical solutions used in the silent film era are traced into the sound film era right up to Nino Rota’s collaborations with Federico Fellini. Initially, in publishing this translation of “Pierrot at the Cinema,” our aim was to call attention to the very sophisticated school of Italian film music studies and the contributions they have been making to film music history. Piccardi was the first candidate for the obvious reason that his research and discussion of sources was simply in a league of its own. Many of the sources dwelt on the way music interacted with pantomime and film action, an element that we as scholar/ practitioners find particularly fascinating. However, it would be well to note that there is no chapter on pantomime in Rick Altman’s equally well-researched Silent Film Sound (NY, Columbia University Press, 2004). In a quick review of pantomime practices in the US to 1922 via Chronicling America, a Library of Congress/National Endowment for the Humanities digital newspaper archive, I found many references to an active dance, acrobatic and mime pantomime tradition (many accompanied by elaborate music) that included both American and European individuals and troupes. Carlo Piccardi has established the connection for Europe; the connection between pantomime and cinema music in the US still remains to be established. Gillian Anderson