We have been talking a lot about the NewsEye platform since the beginning of this course since it will be the basis of our work, but what exactly is NewsEye?

NewsEye is a research project:

The NE platform is produced in an international research project funded by the European Union. The NewsEye H2020 project, from May 2018 until April 2021, is an interdisciplinary undertaking involving 3 European national libraries, four humanities and social science research groups and four computer science research groups. The core concept of NE is a seamlessly integrated armoury of tools and methods that will improve the users' capability to access, analyse and use the content in the digital libraries of historical newspapers.

Specifically, in the context of historical newspapers written in German, Finnish, Swedish and French, with a focus on the period 1850-1950, the project aims to develop a toolbox consisting of two main layers, as well as novel research results on several topics and in several fields of digital humanities, based on documents in different languages, to demonstrate the potential extent of its usefulness as a catalyst for the seamless development of novel research.

NewsEye is an interdisciplinary project:

As you may have understood from reading the studies based on historical newspapers, their analysis requires many skills. Historical skills, for instance, are indispensable for placing the data in context, defining the methodology and exploiting the results. But then computer skills are essential to analyse large volumes of text.
To learn more about interdisciplinarity, its role and its contributions to digital humanities, watch the following video:

What are the benefits of interdisciplinarity for analysing the historical newspapers, and more broadly for the digital humanities, discussed in this video?

NewsEye is a platform:

The platform is accessible at this address. It is a project still under active development, and the interfaces and tools are likely to change regularly, but they can already be used.

In detail, the first layer of the NewsEye toolbox focuses on tools to improve and enrich historical newspapers, with improved text recognition and article segmentation, followed by semantic enrichment through the recognition and linking of named entities, stance detection, and novelty detection. A language-independent set of higher-quality data results from this step, already allowing an enriched experience and access to the newspaper collections.

The second layer of the toolbox provides ways to benefit from this enriched dataset through dynamic text analysis tools interacting with respect to user activities: contextualised topic modelling, viewpoint and comparative analysis, etc. In addition, an innovative personal research assistant can design strategies (plans) for finding something interesting and revise them on the fly when needed. It consists of an investigator (dynamically finding and suggesting novel ideas), a reporter (summarising the grounds for all suggestions) and an explainer (allowing the user to understand the suggestions by herself and to return to the original data to confirm or infirm them).

During this course, we will use the NewsEye platform and its various tools to conduct analyses and work on case studies. The following video gives you an overview of the platform's features.