1.1 Introduction to Historical Newspaper Analysis and Digitisation

1.1.1 Historical newspapers: an infinite source of data

Newspapers collect information about cultural, political and social events in a more detailed way than any other public record. Since their beginnings in the 17th century, they have been recording billions of events, stories and personal names in almost every language, every country and every day.
In many parts of the world, particularly in Europe, many efforts have been made to make this endless source of information available to all. Many countries have created digital libraries that make their collections available in digital form. In the United States, for example, the Library of Congress provides access to its online collection of historical newspapers, Chronicling America (https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/). In France, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF) and its websites Gallica (http://gallica.bnf.fr) and retronews (http://www.retronews.fr) offer this service and provide access to over 5 million issues of newspapers and magazines. The Austrian National Library offers its digital library access to 1400 press titles and more than 24 million pages. New content is added regularly by all major digital libraries.
The volume of data available is thus enormous. To navigate through this data, the websites of the major libraries offer search engines and filtering functions. It is possible to consult precise press titles on well-defined chronological periods or based on keywords. These digital libraries also often provide the possibility to export the results and access the raw texts.

The importance of newspapers as cultural heritage is thus irrefutable. Still, whilst some progress has been made concerning digitising newspapers, their potential as data opens up new possibilities for their exploration and analysis using digital methods. However, the recent progress of dedicated projects such as the NewsEye project (https://www.newseye.eu/) offer new ways to read and access an in-depth analysis of large collections of European historical newspapers.

What can be done with digitised newspapers?

Treating the digitised historical newspapers as data allows us to renew our point of view on many historical research questions. On specific subjects, it also makes possible studies requiring many sources in a reasonable time. As an example, we propose the reading of two articles on very different subjects that both use digitised historical newspapers as data: