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 recorded billions of events, stories and names in almost every language, every country, every day. Newspapers have always been an important medium for disseminating public and political opinions, literary works, essays and art. This thematic wealth sets them at the centre stage for anyone interested in European cultural heritage.

During the last few decades, tens of millions of newspaper pages from European libraries have been digitised and made available online. National libraries aim to intensify their digitisation efforts in the coming years due to a large demand for access to historical newspapers. The broad public shows general interest in this historical and cultural resource, but it is also crucial for many humanities scholars.

Newspapers are, therefore, an invaluable source of information about the past, but their exploitation requires many skills in different fields: 

• In computer sciences: text recognition, text analysis, natural language processing (NLP), computational creativity and natural language generation,
• in digital newspaper research, addressing several editorial issues like optical character recognition (OCR) and article separation,
• in Digital Humanities, with respect to the vast amounts of text material, the availability of useful tools and the possibilities of searching and browsing,
• in history, in terms of analysing historical assets with new methods across different language corpora.

Tools, such as the NewsEye platform and software libraries in Python language exist to answer all these challenges. You will be able to understand them by measuring their advantages and disadvantages and using them to manipulate the corpus construction tools, the text analysis tools and the NewsEye platform. Whether you are a computer scientist, a historian, or a political science student, you can work on any subject that interests you and exploit the potential of the digitised historical newspapers.