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Reading Newspaper Essay, English Composition Writing on Reading
Newspaper
{1}Newspapers are an encyclopedia of current events. Through the
help of newspapers, we come to understand the world without having
to travel to the places where important events have taken place. But
a newspaper more than carries simple news items, it also provides,
in different sections, instructions on such things as first aid,
cooking, playing the chess and taking pictures. Thus besides making
us acquainted with the world, reading newspapers can also widen our
scope of knowledge. Everybody should read newspapers.
{2}I get up early every morning in order to have a quiet time to do
things I like, such as writing letters, reading newspapers,
listening to music and so on. You will be surprised to know that the
newspaper which I read early every morning is always from the
previous day. This is because, as a married woman who holds a
regular job, I am busy with my work from morning till night, and
during the only hour which belongs to me the newspaper-boy hasn't
delivered the day's paper yet. Nevertheless, I still enjoy reading
my newspaper. Besides domestic and international news on economy,
politics, and cultural activities, there are also amusing cartoons,
interesting stories and a wonderful literary section. Reading my
newspaper early in the morning makes me fell good for the whole day.
{3}Reading newspaper every day has become a habit to me. As a
student, I have no time to watch TV news. Accordingly, reading
newspapers becomes the only way for me to learn about things which
have happened around the world. The newspapers, however, do not only
carry the latest world news, they also give us a great deal of
useful knowledge. Reading newspapers is, in my opinion, a must for a
modern man.
{4}I make it a rule to read the newspaper every day. As a student, I
have no time to watch news programs on TV. Besides, watching
television takes up a lot of time. Consequently, reading the
newspaper becomes the only way for me to learn about what's
happening around the world.
There is an old Chinese saying: "A scholar need not leave his home
to know what's going on in the world." While newspapers do not carry
the latest, up-to-the minute world news, they give us a great deal
of useful knowledge. Thus, reading the newspaper is, in my opinion,
a must for those who wish to keep up with the times.
{5}Yesterday I read an English newspaper for the first time. When I
spread it out, I didn't know where to start. All the headlines
confused me and the writing style of the articles was very different
from that of what we usually read. However, after looking up the new
words left and right in the dictionary, I finally made out the
meaning more or less.
Reading newspapers was not as easy as I had expected, but it offered
me a sense of achievement and aroused my interest in learning the
language. The comic strip was the first part of this newspaper I
read. Some of them are quite amusing, some philosophical, and still
others quite political. Then I tried to read other parts of the
newspaper, like the editorial and local news. Through this
experience, I have acquired a better and newer channel of learning
English.
Additional
reference material
The American humorist,
Will Rogers, used to say, “All I know is what I read in the
newspaper.” This was an exaggeration for humorous purpose, but it is
true that reading newspapers can widen our scope of
knowledge, enrich us with common sense, and improve
English-learner’s competence, thus I took the the Reading Course in
American and British News Publications this semester. Getting more
familiar with newspapers reading, I decide to make a comparison of
newspapers in Britain and the USA for this course paper.
Early newspapers in Britain and the USA
The United Kingdom has one of the world’s oldest established
newspaper industries, which can be dated back to the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth century when the British economy began to
industrialize and the democratic franchise was extended to larger
segments of the population and the rising literacy levels resulted
form the introduction of mass education did great contribute to the
appearance of more and more newspapers. But according to the
Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition (2001), the first daily paper
in England was the Daily Courant (1702). While in the United States,
82 years later, the first daily, the Pennsylvania Packet and General
Advertiser, appeared in Philadelphia.
Daily newspapers in Britain
There are now more than 1400 different newspapers that cater for all
walks of life, among which there are about 130 daily newspapers and
11 of them are delivered nationwide. There are two kinds of
newspaper. One is large in size and has many detailed articles about
national and international events. These newspapers are called the
serious papers or the quality papers. The other kind, called the
popular papers or the tabloids is smaller in size, have more
pictures, often in color, and shorter articles, often about less
important events or about the private lives of well-know people.
Although some people disapprove of the tabloids, more people buy
them than buy the serious newspaper. For most British people, most
days starts with a look at the morning newspaper. On an average day,
90 per cent of Britons over the age of 15 read a national or local
paper, which makes British newspaper culture differ from American
newspaper culture where newspaper reading is mainly middle-class
habit. Therefore, Britain has one of the highest levels of newspaper
sales per head of population. And newspaper plays an important role,
together with other means of media, in producing a national culture.
People from different parts of the country all share the same
experience. Even though they might live on the coast of Scotland or
in Belfast or in London or in Welsh, if they were to meet, they
could discuss what they had read or seen and this would remind them
that as people living in Britain they are all part of a particular
culture. Besides, there are daily newspapers in all parts of Britain
that cover local news as well as some national and international
stories. Local papers give information about films, concerts, and
other things that are happening in the local neighborhood,
including, for example, information about local people who have been
married or died recently. (National papers generally give
information about film, concerts and other events happening in
London).
Daily newspapers in the USA
There are more than 1500 daily newspapers in the US, of which fewer
are available throughout the whole country, USA today and the
National edition of the New York Times and the Christian Science
Monitor, to name just a few. Another two newspapers, the Los Angeles
Times and the Washington Post are know and respected all over the US
but cannot be bought everywhere. Some other important newspapers
are: the Boston Globe, sold in New England, the Chicago Tribune,
sold in the Midwest, and the Washington Post on the East Coast. So,
people from different parts of this vast land might not be able to
talk as the Britons do without difficulty in discussing the news
issues from the papers they read. In larger cities there is often
more than one newspaper and the different ones express different
political opinions. As the U.S. population in the latter half of the
20th cent has shifted from cities to suburbs, and with the growth in
competition from other media, many large city newspapers have had to
cease publication, merge with their competitors, or be taken over by
a chain of newspaper publishers. And in the 1960s a group of
newspapers began to appear that were later called in “alternative
press”. They expressed extreme political opinions, especially
left-wing opinion. Many of the newspapers, which were part of this
movement, such as the Village Voice in New York or the Reader in
Chicago, are less extreme today and more widely read. One more thing
that is unique to the newspaper in the USA is that a number of
American newspapers are published in languages other than English.
An example of a foreign-language paper published in an urban area is
El Diário in New York.. This, to some extend, reflects American’s
“melting pot” characteristics. The population of the United States
includes a large variety of ethnic groups coming from many races,
nationalities, and religions.
Sunday newspapers in Britain and the USA
Daily newspapers are published on every day of the week except
Sunday in Britain. Sunday newspapers are larger than daily
newspapers, often having 2 or 3 sections. There is also other a
magazine, called the color supplement. All the Sunday newspapers are
national Serious newspapers include the Observer, the Sunday Times,
the Sunday Telegraph and the Independent on Sunday, the Sunday
Mirror, the Sunday Express, the News of the World and the Sunday
Sport which is considered to lack much serious information. And in
the USA, Sunday newspapers are more or less the same. Sunday
newspapers, which are delivered on Sunday as well, are very big,
often having several separate parts. They contain many longer
articles and a lot of advertisements. Each section deals with a
different subject. E.g. national and international news, sport,
travel, etc. One section, the classifieds has advertisements for
jobs and things for sale. Another section is called the funnies.
There is often also a magazine, which is in color.
In conclusion, British newspapers succeed in engendering a national
culture while American newspapers display its country’s
multicultural characteristics. And both of these two developed
countries have long established it newspaper industries and people
are always choosing to read the newspaper according to their own
taste and political beliefs and most of the readers have the strong
awareness of what their governments are doing and the problems their
countries my be facing and they are completely free to express their
own opinions all the time.
More reference material for
your essay writing research
The Role of Newspapers in
Our Digital Age
With increased digitization of historic newspapers, new
opportunities have arisen to study and explore the content of these
important sources. One special collections librarian has noted that
digitization can make once neglected sources more prominent, and
that “in hard copy, the material may have seemed obscure; when
digitized it becomes a core resource.”1 Digitization of historic
newspapers may lead to new and unexpected user groups and help
redefine the ways traditional user groups have utilized them.
Individual parts of newspapers often make up important aspects of a
variety of digital collections. Some digital collections use
selected newspaper articles to explore historical themes, some have
used newspaper photographs or cartoons to provide visual images of
particular time periods, others have used advertisements to explore
the material culture or economic patterns of a given time. This
paper will present an overview of the many uses of newspapers, both
in their digitized and traditional forms. In so doing, we hope to
make a case for the importance of these sources and also examine the
ways in which digitization will expand their use.
Debate Over Use of Newspapers As Historical Material
Despite the vast amount of information they contain, newspapers were
not always considered trustworthy sources of historical information.
The former editor of the Washington Post, Philip Graham, once called
newspapers the “first rough draft of history.” He viewed journalism
and consequently the writing of newspapers as an important task that
contributed to the overall good of the community. Not all opinions
regarding the importance of newspapers have been as positive. Normal
Mailer once quipped that, “once a newspaper touches a story, the
facts are lost forever.” Leo Tolstoy was an even harsher critic who
suggested that “all newspaper and journalistic activity is an
intellectual brothel from which there is no retreat.” A more
positive view of newspapers was once offered by Arthur Miller who
suggested that “a good newspaper, I suppose is a nation talking to
itself.” Debate regarding the validity and use of newspapers as
scholarly sources follow many of these same themes: whether
newspapers can be used to determine factual validity, if they are
hopelessly biased and tainted, or if they can accurately represent
public opinion.
One of the earliest proponents of using newspapers as historical
sources was Thomas Donaldson, a Baltimore lawyer and engineer, who
advocated their use as a historical tool during an 1845 speech in
front of The Maryland Historical Society. He suggested that using
newspapers makes writing history much more lively, for “how much
more interesting is an account of any transactions from the mouth of
one who has himself taken part in, or at least witnessed the scenes
which he describes, than even the most elegant recital from the pen
of one who has received the story at second hand.”2 Donaldson
asserted that newspapers are best used as primary rather than
secondary sources, believing that all accounts were written
first-hand.
The American historian James Ford Rhodes offered a more thorough
defense of the importance of newspapers as historical sources in
1901. He argued that hidden within newspapers are important stories
and perspectives not found in any other sources, and cites his own
personal experience of finding an excellent personal narrative of
the Whig Convention of 1852 in the Boston Courier, that provided
details he did not find anywhere else.3 Rhodes also suggested that
newspapers can be a trustworthy source because “they are
contemporary, and being written without knowledge of the end, cannot
bolster any cause without making a plain showing of their intent.”
He concluded that their most important use was in presenting “a
graphic picture of society” through the use of their news stories,
editorials and advertisements.
Rhodes also proposed that newspapers could be used to compile a
chronological factual history, one area where many other scholars
are doubtful, and argued that newspapers can be studied both as a
reflection and creator of public opinion. He offered the historian
one caveat in that the political orientation of each newspaper must
be considered when determining the publication’s validity or bias.
He nonetheless concluded that “the duty of the historian, is not to
decide if the newspapers are as good as they ought to be, but to
measure their influence on the present, and to recognize their
importance, as an ample and contemporary record of the past.”4 His
advice still holds sound for those who wish to use historical
newspapers to explore the past today.
Similar praise for newspapers as sources of history was offered by
William Nelson at an annual meeting of the American Historical
Association in 1908. He focused specifically on newspapers of the
eighteenth century and enumerated a number of ways that they could
be used. Nelson argued that scholars could trace the growth of
revolutionary sentiment and political parties through the
development of the editorial, the economic development of the
colonies through the increase and changes in types of
advertisements, and the social life of the colonies through a
variety of other newspaper features. While Nelson noted that many
scholars felt history could not be written from newspapers, he
concluded his speech with the assertion that “I think it will appear
that the historians who ignores that field will miss a great and
invaluable mass of material.”5
In 1923, Lucy Maynard Salmon published The Newspaper and the
Historian, a book that is considered by many to be the definitive
work on newspapers as reference sources. Her purpose was to discover
the limitations and advantages of using newspapers as historical
materials, and in the course of its seven hundred pages she analyzed
various components of newspapers, such as advertisements and
editorials, and then examined how they might be used by historians.
Salmon argued that newspapers couldn’t be used to reconstruct
factual events but that historians could use them to “lend color and
vivacity to the past” and to create a “graphic description of
society.”6 Salmon was also one of the first historians to suggest
the study of advertisements as a source for social history.
There have also been more modern discussions regarding the
reliability of newspapers as sources. In 1970, William Taft
published a work entitled Newspapers As Tools For Historians. In
this book he discussed the responsibilities of both the press and
historians and ultimately concluded that while newspapers can be
useful research tools, they should be used with caution. The
influence of the time period in which this work was written in can
be clearly seen, for Taft displays a great distrust of newspapers as
sources due to coverage of the Vietnam War. Nonetheless Taft also
corresponded with a number of historians in the writing of his book,
and drew conclusions from their letters as to the best uses of
newspapers.
Taft found that most historians believed that newspapers were not
reliable sources for documenting facts, but that they were a more
valuable tool when used in conjunction with other primary sources.
When evaluating a newspaper as a potential evidentiary source, he
argued that one must consider where newspapers get their news, the
political orientation of a newspaper, and the importance of using
multiple newspapers to establish different points of view.7 In his
book, he offered direct quotes from many historians as to why
newspapers make useful source material. Perhaps the strongest
endorsement he received was the statement “newspapers contain so
many different types of material that no simple statement about
their value is possible.”8 Taft concluded that newspapers could be
used for sources of documentary materials such as the text of
speeches, results of press conferences and diplomatic notes, and for
sources of public opinion through the study of editorials, letters
to the editor, and syndicated materials.
Even more recently in 1993, journalism historian Jerry W. Knudson,
wrote an article for the American Historical Association’s
newsletter Perspectives discussing the fact that too many historians
have neglected the usefulness of newspapers as historical sources.
In contrast to Taft’s findings, he argues that too many historians
view newspapers simply as sources of factual information. Knudson
believes that newspapers have unfortunately been “shunned as
historical sources by generations of historians.”9 He suggests that
newspapers may not only reflect public opinion but also that “the
perception of events as filtered through the press may have changed
the historical outcome.” Knudson ultimately concludes that for the
historian trying to understand public opinion the newspaper serves
as both a primary and secondary source.
Librarians as well as historians frequently recognized the
importance of newspapers not just for historians but for other
audiences as well. “Newspapers are not merely historical sources for
academics,” argues British librarian David Stoker, “but have an
equally important role in education and for all that are interested
in the past. Of course any reasonably sophisticated reader knows
that all newspapers are at times inaccurate or else select,
interpret, and at times distort the events they report. Indeed some
newspapers even today will print what amounts to little more than
barefaced lies. They must therefore be used with care--yet this must
apply to any historical source.”10 Stoker offers strong support for
the idea that newspapers are as important as any other treasured
primary source material.
Librarians Shannon E. Martin and Kathleen Hansen have also written
extensively on the importance of newspapers as reference sources.
They believe that newspapers are important historical sources for
they provide comprehensive reports of daily events of both local
communities and the nation, authoritative records and official
notices of government action and activity, organized chronicles of
events that can be archived and used for historical reference, and
capture the tenor and tone of their time.11
Strong support for newspapers as research sources has also been
offered by Jon Vanden Heuvel, who published a major overview of
archival newspaper collections in 1990. He argues that newspapers
“yield not only the information printed in black and white, but if
one reads between the lines, they tell about the underlying
assumptions and values of a society that produces and reads them.”12
Vanden Heuvel is one of many scholars who suggest that newspapers
are an important source for the evaluation of public opinion or the
public mood. He also illustrates various avenues of historical
research that could be done using the press including ethnic press
research, comparisons of regional and geographic presses, urban
history and any number of topical research questions.
Current Uses of Newspapers by Historians & Social Scientists
Although most scholars outside the fields of journalism history and
communications do not rely exclusively on newspapers for their
research materials, many different types of historical studies have
used newspapers as a major form of primary source material. Some
studies offer a close reading of a particular newspaper, looking for
its coverage of a particular historical event. Others discuss how a
particular historic event was covered by multiple newspapers in
order to study regional and cultural differences in coverage. Some
historians use newspapers to look at the opinions either of or about
a particular ethnic, racial or regional community. Many historians
use newspapers as a gauge or measure of public opinion at a
particular time. Regardless of how they are used, many historians
consider them to be invaluable sources. In a historic documents
study, newspapers on microfilm were the microfilmed source requested
most often by historians, particularly local and public
historians.13
While some historians have used the entire newspaper as the basis
for their research, others have used just one particular feature of
the newspaper. The next section will provide an overview of the
different ways in which historians and social scientists have used
newspapers. The examples are by no means inclusive and are just a
sample of the many scholarly works that have made major use of
newspapers as a source.
Use of Newspaper Advertisements
Lucy Maynard Salmon believed that newspaper advertisements could be
used to study purchasing patterns, economic history, and social
attitudes, among other things.14 Salmon argued that by studying the
advertisements from one store over a year you could learn not only
about what was on sale but a graphic history of that business, the
markets to and from which they shipped, the business methods they
employed, and their relationship to their patrons. She also proposes
that broad geographic comparisons of business practices can be made
by researching what was sold and advertised in different sections of
the country, thus helping historians learn more about the material
conditions of life. Other examples she gave included finding out
information about labor strikes by tracing the number of ads placed
by “strike breakers” and studying the number of employment ads for
labor trends and shortages. William Nelson also offered a number of
ways that advertisements could be used to find “abundant
illustration of the economic and social life and progress in
material affairs by the people”.15 In his survey of eighteenth
century newspapers, he contended that the changes in advertisements
over a number of years illustrated such events as the improvements
of roads through the demand for more carriages and a growing and
profitable population through the growing need for housing materials
and fine furnishings. He also suggests that these newspapers
advertisements are one of the few places that the progress in
colonial manufactures such as “mines, forges and furnaces” can be
traced.
A number of scholars have used newspaper advertisements to explore
economic history in ways similar to those recommended by Salmon and
Nelson. One historian used advertisements from antebellum New York
City newspapers to estimate the rental price of housing in New York,
and how it was related to the cost of living and trends in
urbanization. Robert Margo illustrates that newspapers contain a
wealth of information that can be used as fundamental statistics for
economic history such as changing prices of consumer goods and
housing stock.16 Another scholar developed a “tentative methodology”
for creating databases of retail price data from newspaper
advertisements. Peter Shergold found that Census data and other
existing data series for urban grocery prices at the turn of the
century were not sufficient, so he created a price series from
“detailed grocery advertisements placed in the local newspapers by
the cut-rate shops, chain stores and department stores.” 17 Although
he concluded that his methodology would need some work, he felt that
the data he obtained could serve as an important corrective to data
series created by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Other historians
have used information gleaned from newspaper advertisements to make
arguments about the development of a particular industry, changes in
buying patterns, or the development of business trends.
One interesting use of newspaper advertisements was Augusta
Rohrbach’s exploration of the Liberator’s use of advertising as well
as letters to the editor to draw conclusions about abolitionist
ideology, American identity and the development of consumer culture
in the mid-nineteenth century.18 Rohrbach conducts both a content
and visual analysis of advertisements to support her conclusions.
She explores the Liberator’s special use of italics, boldface and
capital letters, arguing that Garrison used uppercase fonts and bold
typeface and to emphasize certain points. Rohrbach also compares
sample advertising pages of the Liberator and the National Era, a
mainstream newspaper at the time, to illustrate the differences in
style. Not only did the Liberator make greater use of blank space
and varied typespace but Garrison also chose advertisers according
to their views, and gave free space to patent medicines he had
personally found useful.
Newspaper advertisements have also been used by scholars to help
reconstruct what life might have been like in rural communities. An
article published in North Louisiana History uses a variety of
Louisiana newspapers from the nineteenth century to reconstruct
daily life. They offer examples from letters to the editor, slave
notices, recipes, weather reports, the social pages, and
particularly newspaper advertisements to draw conclusions about life
in rural Natchitoches county in the antebellum period.19 The authors
use advertisements for parties, social revues and shows to
illustrate the social life of the town. They also trace the
development of industries within a town by analyzing how the
advertising for goods and services changed over time. Business and
classified advertisements also allowed them to develop a sense of
what the community needed and purchased, helping them to establish
the material conditions of life at the time. The authors conclude
that “all of these notices, of one category or another, serve as a
foundation of sorts, as to some of the activities in which
Natchitoches residents were involved.”20
A similar type of study was done by Roger W. Rodgers. He surveyed
newspaper advertisements from Northeastern Texas from 1842 to 1861
to reveal aspects of daily life including business patterns, the
prevalence of patent medicines and the lack of public education.
Rodgers suggests that “a general reading of advertisements provides
a plain, straight-forward medium to view the culture, attitudes, and
peculiarities of that time and place. The costs and methods of
transportation, the nature of public notices and meetings, and the
availability and costs of education are all easily available.” 21
Historian Jane Lamm Carroll also studied a variety of Minnesota
newspapers from 1842 to 1858 and used both their editorials and
advertisements to create a picture of daily life. She also explored
how Minnesota newspaper editors used their papers to battle over
issues such as abolition and statehood. One of her most humorous
examples discussed how Minnesota newspaper editors attempted to
encourage settlement in the state through “filling their columns
with detailed descriptions of the region’s natural beauty, abundant
resources, fertile soil and healthy climate.” 22 These studies are
emblematic of a large number of studies done and published in local
history journals, where small community newspapers are used to give
a sense of what life was like during a particular period.
Some scholars study how gender relations or roles can be inferred
from newspaper advertisements. One such study was done by Sarah
Leavitt, who explored advertisements involving runaway wives in
Providence, Rhode Island newspapers from 1790-1810. Male subscribers
would place ads to repudiate their wives’ debts and women would
sometimes respond to the ads to defend themselves. Leavitt used
these advertisements to draw larger conclusions about marital
relations and the opportunities available to women in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. She suggests that “an
examination of these advertisements can tell us a great deal about
marriage, and the lives of women” during this period. 23
A related exploration of women’s issues through the study of
newspaper advertisements was conducted by Andrea Tone. Tone studied
late nineteenth century newspaper advertisements for information
about contraceptives and birth control materials, in order to see if
they changed or disappeared after the passage of the Comstock Law in
1873. Andrea Tone uses those advertisements in addition to other
primary sources to establish that contraceptive use was more widely
distributed than thought before and that it transcended economic
boundaries in the late nineteenth century. She found that despite
passage of the law, contraceptive products were still advertised.
“Proprietors disguised their products through creative relabeling,”
Tone argues, “Classified ads published in the medical, rubber and
toilet goods sections of dailies and weeklies indicate a flourishing
contraceptive trade in the post-1873 United States. The hitch was
that contraceptives were rarely advertised openly as “preventives.”
24
Other types of advertisements from nineteenth century newspapers
have also been used to determine information about the lives of
slaves. One historian used advertisements for runaway slaves and
newspaper notices to search for slave clothing data. She compiled
data from a variety of Southern newspapers and demonstrated that
there is almost no other source which contains this information.25
Scholars from other disciplines can also rely heavily on newspaper
advertisements for source material. In the early 1990s, a
sociologist conducted an analysis of advertisements drawn from a
large sample of nineteenth century newspapers to explore the
occupational pursuits open to women and how it changed over time.26
Martin Schultz believes that newspapers are an excellent data source
as “newspapers in the aggregate have the advantage of providing a
long-term, continuous record that is not limited by city, state, or
regional boundaries.”27 He contrasted nineteenth century newspaper
advertisements with those done in his earlier study of eighteenth
century newspapers, to challenge the idea that women enjoyed a
higher occupational status and freedom in early America that
disappeared in the nineteenth century. Schultz contends that such a
study of the occupational structure and how it changed helps
sociologists explore changes in family structure and relations as
well. An earlier study of newspaper ads conducted by this same
author found that in the late seventeenth century, nearly half of
all ads placed for women were in regard to domestic and personal
service employment, and often the domestic role had been combined
with commercial enterprises controlled by their husbands.28
Schultz admits that newspaper advertisements have some limitations,
for they provide a better record of some occupations than others and
also provide little background information about workers themselves.
Thus newspaper advertisements would be only one potential source for
a larger study. Nonetheless Schultz argues that his two studies of
women’s occupational trends through newspaper advertisements helped
him to better understand the economic opportunities historically
available to women. Through a sophisticated sampling methodology and
complicated coding analysis, Schultz found that although domestic
and personal service advertisements remained statistically higher
than all other positions, there were a striking number of
advertisements seeking women to fill roles as professional teachers,
artists, midwives and retailer as well as a significant decline in
advertisements seeking women as wet nurses. By doing a systematic
study of newspaper advertisements, Schultz was able to challenge
some previously held tenets about women’s occupational roles and
domestic ideology.
Other scholars have also used newspapers to challenge ideas about
women’s social and occupational status. Lotta Vikstrom contends that
nineteenth century Swedish newspapers complicate the picture
typically constructed of working women from that time period. She
suggests that “newspaper advertisements, announcements and police
reports, for instance reveal the voices of the otherwise silent
women workers and tell us about their urban context.”29 By using
newspapers as a complementary source to parish registers, poll taxes
and census, Vikstrom was able to offer more detailed portraits of
the types of occupations available to women as well as information
on the lives of a number of individual working class women.
As has been demonstrated, newspaper advertisements can be used by
various scholars as forms of historical evidence. In addition,
complicated methodologies must often be developed to create
representative samples of newspaper advertisements for study since
poring through microfilm or hard copies to gather sufficient numbers
is time consuming. One advantage of digitization would be to make
these advertisements keyword searchable, allowing researchers to
find large numbers of advertisements more quickly. Keyword searching
might also help researchers find advertisements that they might
miss, although the limitations of OCR technology and some current
search engines do not guarantee complete accuracy. The segmentation
of advertisements as a separate category that could be searched and
viewed could also save much time for scholars. Less time would be
spent finding advertisements by reeling through microfilm and more
would be spent analyzing the material. Scholars would likely also
welcome the ability to print or email individual advertisements or
page images and utilize the image viewing enhancements provided by
digitization. By being able to save or email individual
advertisements or create a personal digital folder, scholars would
need to take fewer notes from microfilm or find later that they need
to go back to the microfilm to check their citations.
Use of Newspaper Notices-Obituaries, Marriage and Birth Notices
Salmon argued that studying these types of announcements allows one
to trace changes in social conditions. In general, these features of
the newspaper are most frequently used by genealogists researching
their family heritage, but they can also be sources of useful
information for other historians. David Kyvig, author of Nearby
History, suggests that “newspaper obituaries can be very useful
sources of information about the lives of individuals and, taken
collectively, about patterns of association, social and religious
practice, and other matters within a community.”30
Newspaper obituaries can also be used for social history, and a
variety of scholars have used them, particularly in the history of
medicine. One journalism historian discussed how obituaries could be
used to explore changing cultural patterns in the nineteenth
century. He chose obituaries because they were one of the first
“informational items to be consistently published in early British
and American papers,” and became standardized rapidly.31 Frederic
Endres suggests that systematically studying obituaries “may tell
something about the cultural values of a given society, as well as
something about the values and attitudes and vocational
socialization of the editors who wrote and published the
obituaries.”32 To explore this thesis, he examined four Ohio weekly
newspapers over a number of years in the early nineteenth century
and coded obituary notices. He found that more obituaries were for
men, particularly those who were socially prominent, and that
obituaries for women clearly identified their marital status,
defined them in terms of male relations, almost never included any
educational or occupational information, and tended to describe them
in stereotyped gender roles. Endres thus concluded that the
‘cultural values of the given societies and editors seem to be
manifested in the obituaries.”33
Janice Hume made newspaper obituaries the subject of an entire book.
She explores how obituaries represented American cultural values and
how cultural changes throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth
century were reflected in obituaries. She analyzed obituaries from a
number of American newspapers and examined changing attitudes about
death and representations of class, race and gender. Although Hume
admits obituaries may not be perfect historical sources she still
offers a strong argument for their collective study. “Obituaries
link published memories of individual lives with generational, or
family memory and with American collective memory.” Hume further
explains, “They add to the understanding of American journalistic
history by showing how news practices associated with the rise of
the mass press might have historically influenced death notices.
Perhaps most importantly, they offer insight into American
values.”34 Although there have not been a great number of studies
using this source, Hume illustrates their importance and offers
potential uses.
Use of Newspaper Illustrations & Political Cartoons
Salmon suggests that illustrations can be excellent sources of
information as they have “comparative freedom from authority” and
often allow more to be shown than can be written in the text. In one
example, she offers her own insights gained from tracing the
illustration of women over 20 to 30 years and concludes that while
once “illustration did not represent women outside of the fashion
magazine or ballroom…today it shows her engaged in every form of
professional, business and industrial activity.”35 Her example shows
how illustrations can be used to study changing social and gender
roles. Newspaper illustrations often show the social interests of a
particular time, and a historian could trace the prevalence of a
particular kind of illustration or how types of illustrations change
over time.
Thomas Milton Kemnitz has offered a number of ways both opinion and
joke cartoons could be used as historical sources. He suggests that
while “cartoons are frequently fascinating, their value to
historians lies in what they reveal about the societies that
produced and circulated them.”36 Kemnitz believes cartoons depict a
great deal about attitudes and were likely to have been more
influential on shaping public opinion than written material because
“many more people grasp the point of the cartoon on the editorial
page than read the editorials or signed columns.”37 Historians can
use cartoons to explore popular attitudes, rethink the significance
of particular events, and explore how editors tried to sway public
opinion. Kemnitz concludes that scholars using cartoons could study
“the artists, the means by which they reach the public, their
language and symbols, their relation to other means of
communication, their intended function and their audience.”38
A number of scholars have studied political cartoons found in
newspapers in order to explore how cartoons shape and influence
public perceptions. Virginia M. Bouvier explores the relationship
between U.S. political cartoons and the War of 1898. She asserts
that cartoons are important because they can “help illuminate a wide
range of historiographic issues by providing evidence of variations
in regional interpretations of an event, challenging previous
periodization schemes, and illustrating continuities and changes in
historical representations.”39 Bouvier monitored the nature and
frequency of political cartoons that appeared in the New York Herald
in 1898 and believes that this can help measure “how, when and if
public attitudes changed over time, as well as the intensity of
public sentiment over immediate issues.” Her study offers insights
into the portrayal of Cubans and Americans through different images,
and how these helped construct power relationships and national
identities. She recommends that further studies should be done
comparing these cartoons to those of other newspapers, particularly
comparative studies between Latin American, Canadian and European
newspapers. The digitization of these newspapers would make doing
such comparisons quicker, and perhaps lead to further insight. This
same methodology could also be transferred to a study of political
cartoons on other historic events or subjects.
Other historians have made political cartoons, often largely drawn
from newspapers, the primary focus of their research. Roger A.
Fischer published a work entitled Them Damned Pictures: Explorations
in American Political Cartoon Art, which explores different themes
in cartoon art and how they reflected ninteenth century political
thought and social prejudices.40 Another historian focused
exclusively on gathering a collection of newspaper cartoons
published during the Civil War.41 Drawn and Quartered: the History
of American Political Cartoons is another work that examines
political cartoons published in newspapers and other periodicals and
how they related to the political and social climate. This book also
traces the development of the medium from the nineteenth through the
twentieth century.42
Another detailed study of newspaper cartoons in populist newspapers
in the 1890s illustrated how they reflected the social and political
beliefs of their subscribers. These newspapers were highly partisan
and were intended as educational vehicles by their editors. The
Populist Party papers made extensive use of boiler plate syndication
services which included cartoons, so individual cartoons were seen
in large numbers of papers. Worth Robert Miller also contends that
“cartoons frequently can leave a more lasting impression than the
written word. Likewise, they also can reveal the spirit of the times
and even the underlying truth of a situation better than long-winded
editorials.” 43Other scholars have made the comic strip their source
of study rather than the political cartoon. Sylvia Lambert and
Stephen Israelstam explored comic strips appearing in daily
newspapers before and during the Prohibition era to examine how
alcohol was portrayed.44
Use of Newspaper Editorials
Letters to the editor and editorial pages also provide rich source
material. They are used not only to represent the views of newspaper
editors but also to illustrate those of their readers. They are a
means of exploring what issues were important during a time period
and are often used by communication historians to measure levels of
partisanship among various newspapers. A common use of newspaper
editorials is to explore their coverage of a particular historic
time period or event.
One scholar used Parson Brownlow’s editorials in his newspaper The
Knoxville Whig to illustrate the complicated nature of Union
loyalties and attachments in East Tennessee during the Civil War.45
Another scholar studied the editorials in dozens of newspapers
regarding two events: the 1836 anti-abolitionist riots against James
G. Birney and the murder of Elijah P. Lovejoy in 1837.46 He used
these editorials to study the links between political partisanship
and news reporting as well as to study regional differences in
opinion during the antebellum period.
Many historians have also used editorials and letters to the editor
to explore themes of racism and sexism; particularly how different
groups were portrayed and what type of language was used. One
historian examined the editorials in a series of Tennessee
newspapers in 1866 to discover how they were fomented violence
against the African American community.47 The author explores how
newspaper editorials were instrumental in antagonizing the public
through exaggeration and expressed hostility towards both freedmen
and Radical Republicans. Another scholar studied the editorials of
Marsh Murdock published in The Wichita Eagle during the 1870s and
1880s and letters written in response by local citizens to
illustrate differing concepts of domestic ideology.48 Rebecca
Edwards shows how these materials illustrated social and cultural
arguments over women’s appropriate activities and sphere. While both
temperance and suffrage advocates and Murdock employed versions of
“domestic ideology” they were very different from one another.
Edwards proposes that these letters and editorials “tell us a great
deal about Americans’ attitudes toward domesticity and marriage”
during this time period.
Editorials of either one newspaper or multiple newspapers are also
used to explore both press coverage and public opinion regarding
particular historic events. In one study, a scholar traced the
language and development of editorials in the New York Times
regarding the “Indian Problem” from 1860 to 1900.49 Another scholar
traced the editorials of William Randolph Hearst and their effects
on foreign policy.50 There is also a large body of work done
regarding the Civil War and newspaper editorials.
In his study of the Spanish American war using newspaper editorials,
Piero Gleijeses discussed why it took so long to go to war and why
strong opposition to the war did not prevail . He found that both
the McKinley administration papers and Congressional documents
provided little information about anti-war opinions. Gleijeses thus
turned to newspapers and found that in his examination of over 41
American newspapers in the beginning months of 1898, he was able to
find the only “coherent, well articulated and explicit explanation
of the anti-war position.”51 Through an extensive reading of these
newspaper editorials, Gleijeses was able to show that a strong
anti-war feeling did exist, even if it did not prove to be
persuasive.
Use of Newspapers in Social History
Social historians use newspapers in a number of different ways.
While some study the content of advertisements to learn about the
material conditions of daily life, others use them to explore
representations of gender or race. Some scholars conduct in-depth
exploration of literary stories that are printed to find hidden
voices of the oppressed. Other scholars study political and social
discourse through computerized content analysis.
One interesting example of an in-depth textual analysis was
conducted by Edward E. Baptist. His analysis focused exclusively on
just one story published in the antebellum newspaper, The
Tallahassee Star of Florida, in 1841. Baptist argues that while
antebellum newspapers and most other primary Southern sources are
mediated through Southern elites, such documents, particularly
newspapers, still allow us to hear the voices of common whites and
slaves if you can “read against the grain” and understand the
context.52 He analyzes a single newspaper story which belittles the
antics of a lower class white man named Snell, and uses it to
explore attitudes of Southern newspaper editors, the influence of
“poor white humor”, and ideas about masculinity in the antebellum
South. Baptist contends that scholars have underutilized Southern
newspaper writers, particularly those of antebellum newspapers.
While these newspapers have been used extensively in local studies,
Baptist also believes that “future historians of Southern ideology
and culture” should consider using these them to find a wealth of
information. 53 Baptist urges other historians to search for these
kinds of stories in other antebellum newspapers. If more Southern
newspapers from the antebellum period were digitized and more easily
available for scholarly inquiry it is likely that these kinds of
literary texts could be more easily isolated within newspapers.
Another scholar studied the rhetoric of black abolitionism by doing
a content analysis of five black abolitionist newspapers in New
York. This study done by Timothy Shortell utilized computerized
content coding using SemioCode to generate frequencies and
co-occurrences for a set of sixteen themes such as justice or
liberty.54 The paragraph was used as the coding unit and themes were
“operationalized as sets of keywords.” Paragraphs were coded for
tone, for basis, and for rhetoric by four trained readers. A sample
of newspaper texts was drawn from each of the five newspapers using
published collections and microfilm reels, and ultimately 257
paragraphs (36,000 words) of text were analyzed. A sample of
paragraphs was also drawn from the Working Man’s Advocate, a
nineteenth century New York labor newspaper as a point of
comparison.
After analyzing these texts, Shortell was able to show significant
differences in the rhetoric used by different black abolitionist
newspapers. Shortell had to randomly selected paragraphs for his
analysis due to time constraints, so it would be interesting to see
how his conclusions might have changed if he had been able to use
fully digitized versions of these newspapers.
Other scholars have also studied the discourse of newspapers to
explore other historical issues. Communications professor David
Domke has considered how discourse in the press has affected race
relations and how it has changed over time. He examined the racial
ideologies and discourse of 14 mainstream newspapers regarding U.S.
Supreme Court decisions in 1883 and 1896. Domke studied these
newspapers first through textual analysis and then through a
discourse analysis of over 142 selected editorials and articles.
Domke concludes that “analysis, then, of how Black and White
Americans were described, explained and positioned in language in
the mainstream press likely provides insight into how racial
ideologies were reinforced or challenged during the late nineteenth
century.”55
A variety of work has been done by scholars who have used newspapers
to explore how they both reflect and construct ideas about a variety
of issues including crime, urbanization, and representations of
race, class, gender and national identity. One interesting use of
newspapers to study historical crime statistics was conducted by
Douglas Eckberg, who used homicide accounts from newspapers to match
against county coroner records to try and calculate the exact number
of murders that occurred between 1877 and 1878 in Charleston, South
Carolina. He suggests that often the newspapers provided more
information, even if they were lax about exact names, dates and
place names.”56 In another interesting study, William D. Howden
analyzed a series of feature stories done by the New York Times on
New York City churches from 1874 to 1875. He argues that these
stories illustrated upper class fears and concerns about immigration
and urbanization in New York City. 57
There are a growing number of studies that use newspapers to help
recast perceptions about minority communities, particularly in the
nineteenth century. Historian Haiming Liu used newspapers as a major
source in his history of Chinese herbalists in late nineteenth
century California. During this period many newspapers and health
officials blamed Chinese immigrants for spreading disease. Despite
this, Liu contends that many Chinese herbalists managed to establish
successful practices that drew clients from a variety of racial
backgrounds. Liu points to newspaper advertisements that herbalists
placed in the local press, particularly ones that were used to
actively solicit white clients. In addition, Liu also offers
examples of letters written to newspapers by Chinese herbalists
defending and promoting their profession.58
Urban historians have also used historic newspaper accounts to
explore ideas about poverty, race, gender, and class and how the
discourse of popular newspapers often constructed ideas that still
affect our views of urban slums today. In his book, The Imagined
Slum, A.J.C. Mayne studied newspaper accounts of three cities,
Sydney, San Francisco and Birmingham, England.59 He looked at the
language of newspaper accounts and argues that they created the idea
of a dangerous slum by reaffirming “bourgeoisie values” and that
these accounts still color our understanding today. A similar study
by Paul Reckner discussed how nineteenth century representations of
the Five Points neighborhood in New York in newspapers and popular
literature still define and constrain our historical memory of this
area. He concludes that “newspaper stories and novels do more than
simply inform “public” historical memories, however. The narratives
these sources employ also impact journalists (as well as historians
and researchers) as consumers of popular media in their own
right.”60 The author found that despite the fact that many of their
archaeological findings contradicted some popular historical
assumptions about the Five Points area, their efforts were met with
opposition and even resulted in several critical newspaper columns.
This study helps illustrates the importance of studying newspapers
as to how they shape both public memory and the historical
narratives we construct around particular places.
Yet another study that explored similar issues was conducted by
Richardson Dilworth and Kathryn Trevenen. They explored the
newspaper coverage of two municipal consolidations in the nineteenth
century and how the language used to discuss these consolidations
employed gendered and sexualized terms, particularly metaphors
regarding marriage to support them.61 The authors suggest that
newspapers held a powerful influence over public opinion and the
language that they used illustrated social anxieties about changing
gender roles and the “dangers” of urban life.
While some scholars have used historic newspapers to discover the
nature of nineteenth urban life, others have used them to track the
number historical protest movements and collective actions such as
strikes and civil protest. Sociologists David Schweingruber and
Clark McPhail examined how data about collective actions in the past
have been gathered from newspapers for decades by researchers. While
they did believe that other sources should be consulted as well,
they argued that newspapers offer “continuous records of collective
action from which empirical data sets can be constructed.”62 Similar
research was conducted by sociologists Gregory Maney and Pamela E.
Oliver, who explored a variety of sources including newspapers to
investigate the thoroughness of their coverage of collective
actions. They searched electronic newspaper archives and microfilm
in order to develop strategies to find the largest number of events.
While they found that neither format was ideal due to the
difficulties of reading microfilm and selecting the right keywords,
newspapers were still invaluable sources of information for their
studies.63
Use of Newspapers to Study the History of Science and Medicine
Historic newspapers of the nineteenth century provide a wealth of
information to historians of science, medicine and technology. Many
feature articles were written about contemporary scientific
discoveries and newspapers were filled with advertisements for
patent medicines. A study of these advertisements could reveal
trends in pharmaceuticals as well as changes in medicinal practice.
In addition, obituaries often listed information as to the cause of
death, so trends in mortality and illness can often be explored.
While some historians have used newspapers to try and establish
factual or historical accounts of mortality and sickness, others
have studied how newspaper accounts reflect popular perceptions of
science and discovery. Sociological researchers have also commented
on the usefulness of newspaper archives for gathering historical
data on health inequalities. Two researchers used local newspaper
archives to explore news about contamination, incidents of diseases,
public housing issues and availability of medical care.64
One medical historian studied death and obituary reports published
in newspapers along with a variety of other primary sources to
explore the prevalence and rise of tuberculosis in early America.
Scott D. Holmberg suggests that there are few primary sources to try
to determine the incidence of diseases, but found that early
American newspapers and gazettes on microfilm helped him find a
variety of important information.65 Other scholars have done similar
studies where they used newspaper to obtain information about trends
in mortality, illness and health care. In an article for South
Dakota History, Paula M. Nelson used a variety of notices,
advertisements, obituaries and features published in the small town
newspaper of Canton, South Dakota in the late nineteenth century to
explore the frequency of diseases, the types of medical care
practices and mourning customs for the dead.66 Nelson used
newspapers to obtain factual information about the prevalence of
disease and availability of treatment and to examine the opinions
and attitudes of South Dakotans towards medical practice. In one
broader study, historian Regina Morantz Sanchez used coverage of
questionable surgical practices and manslaughter trials in the
Brooklyn Daily Eagle to investigate both medical and urban history
and the debate over women’s public roles in the late nineteenth
century.67
Other historians of science have used newspapers and the periodical
press to investigate public or popular perceptions of science and
scientific ideas. In a 1975 study Donald Zochert considered how a
variety of different scientific disciplines were portrayed in three
Wisconsin newspapers from 1837 to 1846.68 He contends that although
his study is limited to three newspapers, the news and feature
exchange system that existed between newspapers at the time ensured
that they were reflective of a broad public mindset or opinion.
Zochert concludes that the evidence he drew from newspapers
“demonstrates in both quantity and substance a vigorous sustained
interest in science, in large measure this interest was sustained by
the appeal of social utility and by the search for design and
order.”69 Similarly, several researchers have examined popular
perceptions of individual scientific disciplines in the press. An
article by Paul Dennis analyzed 196 editorials regarding psychology
published in the New York Times between 1904 and 1947.70 He found
that the importance accorded psychology waxed and waned over this
time period. Although this paper relies exclusively on editorials
from one paper it does illustrate how newspapers could be used to
study both the development and opinion of a scientific discipline.
The popular perception of scientific discovery and other categories
of scientists could also be explored.
An earlier study of this same issue was conducted by Ludy T.
Benjamin, Jr. in an article for American Psychologist. He examined
newspaper and periodical press coverage of APA meetings and
psychological studies to explore the public’s perception of
psychology as a science.71 He suggests that prior to World War One
there was little newspaper coverage of psychology, and based his
assertion on examination of newspaper indexes of that period. In a
sample search for psychology on the Brooklyn Daily Eagle72 website,
numerous references to psychology lectures and works were found
starting in 1880. It would be interesting to see how another study
of this same topic might change if access to digital newspapers and
keyword searching could produce more material for analysis.
Newspapers and Literary History
Newspapers from the late nineteenth century and late twentieth
century often contained extensive literary sections that were filled
with short stories, novellas, poems and other works by a variety of
authors. They are often an untapped source for literary scholars
according to Ronald Schuchard, an English professor at Emory
University. In his speech at a 2001 conference entitled “Do We Want
to Keep Our Newspapers”, Schuchard suggested that many of his
colleagues undervalue newspaper research and often fail to examine
newspapers beyond the New York or London Times. He argues that “in
the process of reading and scanning original copies of newspapers
some of us have made the most important scholarly discoveries of our
careers, often serendipitously."73 Schuchard offers several powerful
examples of the importance of newspaper research for literary
scholars. While conducting research for his book Eliot’s Dark Angel,
he would often track down references from Eliot’s letters to
speeches he gave in small towns or public lectures in small local
newspapers. He also found a verbatim transcription of an unknown
Eliot lecture on George Herbert. “That wondrous newspaper page
changes our view of Eliot’s intellectual and poetic development in
the 1930s,” Schuchard explains, “and greatly enhances our
comprehension of his great poem. It certainly transformed my book."
Schuchard also discussed the importance of historic newspapers to
his colleagues who published The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats.
Throughout his letters Yeats referred to plays he produced, theatre
tours he attended, lectures and speeches he gave, articles and
papers he read, and unknown people that he met. In order to
efficiently annotate these letters, the editors traced all of these
references and allusions in the newspaper record, even when they did
not know to which newspaper Yeats sometimes referred. Through
browsing these newspapers, the editors also found unknown Yeats
letters to the editor, letters about him, and his involvement in
newspaper debates, detailed coverage of his lectures and speeches,
as well as drawings, caricatures and photographs of him. Schuchard
sums up the importance of newspapers thusly:
More than any other resource, newspaper material provides the
extraordinary detail, precision,
illumination and clarity that we seek for the letters. In taking
this information out of the newsprint record
and into the scholarly record through the annotations, we are
thereby able to effect revisions not only of
biography and criticism, but of literary, cultural and political
history. In short, with the newspapers of
Colindale we have aimed to set a new standard of editorial
scholarship. The thoroughness and accuracy
of our scholarship depends upon the nature of the reading process,
upon the browsing and searching of
original newspapers.74
In these examples, Schuchard makes a powerful if inadvertent case
for the digitization of such newspapers. Full text searching
capability would likely make finding such important references a far
less arduous affair. In addition, the ability to quickly browse
through back issues of a newspaper in digital format would also
assist in the serendipitous finding of previously unknown lectures
and speeches.
Newspapers and Archaeologists
Newspapers, according to one researcher, are often overlooked as a
source of anthropological data, even though they give insight into
local communities. In his study of several nineteenth century
California newspapers, Richard Hitchcock points out that these
newspapers provided frequent if negative coverage of different
ethnic groups, information not often found in the major urban
dailies. In addition to this kind of anthropological data, he also
argues that archaeological information can be found in newspapers
because articles often provide names, employment locations, and
residential information such as building locations. “Newspapers
provide accurate dates for local happenings,” Hitchcock concludes,
“they provide names, sometimes with interesting spellings. They
provide spatial information through their coverage of fires, new
construction, and other events. Perhaps their most interesting
usage, however, derives from the researcher’s admittance into the
day to day life of the community.” 75
Other archaeologists have used historic newspapers for a variety of
purposes. Stephen Mrozowski states that because newspapers were “a
part of a growing system of communication between commercial centers
in the colonies and in Europe, newspapers can provide the
archaeologist with a rare glimpse into the world of international
exchange.” 76 He also proposes using newspaper advertisements to
help establish dates for artifacts, such as through a catalog he
created of ceramic descriptions form early colonial newspapers. “Ads
provide the archaeologist with periods of availability that are
community or area specific dating guides,” Mrozowski contends,
“While not necessarily a substitute for mean manufacturing dates,
these dates are more sensitive to local market availability.”77 In
addition, to establishing information about the material conditions
of life Mrozowski also suggests using colonial newspapers to explore
links between material culture and gender. Mrozowski ultimately
concludes that newspapers are important documentary sources that
“provide the essential link between material culture, its use, and
the attitudes held in common about it. They may also allow us
insights into the emic perspective of the participants in cultural
systems we wish to understand.”78
Other archaeologists have used historic newspapers, particularly
their advertisements in attempts to reconstruct the material culture
of middle class life. Mary Praetzellis explains that “newspapers,
particularly, advertisements provide an extremely valuable source of
information on the local expressions of consumer trends.
Advertisements give a more explicit indication of the local cost and
availability of various classes of consumer goods.”79 She shows that
useful information such as prices of goods, range of goods
available, the origin of manufacture or shipping, can also help to
partially reconstruct trade networks. Praetzellis also offers the
useful idea of tracing “the social maintenance of ethnic
consciousness” by following the advertisements and notices placed by
groups such as the German Social Club or the African Methodist
Episcopal Church.
Geographers, Geologists & Newspapers
Although a newspaper might not seem like a likely source of data for
geographers, one scholar used them to explore the geographic and
cultural factors behind the placement and creation of several small
towns in Illinois in the nineteenth century. He based his study on
the reports of local correspondents for three newspapers.
“Throughout the late nineteenth century such correspondents
regularly supplied newspapers with information about happenings in
the surrounding countryside.” W.D. Walters Jr. explains, “Usually,
these are just a series of one or two line accounts of local
happenings. Individually they are of small importance, but
collectively they provide a remarkable storehouse of information on
social and economic history.”80 Through these correspondents’
accounts regarding railroad development, local town and state
legislative meetings, and newspaper advertisements, Walters was able
to recreate how towns were laid out and developed.
Newspapers are frequently used as a source of data for historic
seismology. R.M.W. Musson explains that newspapers from the
eighteenth and nineteenth century are often the only source of data
for historic earthquakes in Britain, and information regarding them
can be gleaned from both personal accounts and general descriptions.
While he admits that data gathered from newspapers cannot be used
uncritically because “such reports were not compiled with scientific
intent” he still concludes that they are an invaluable data
source.81 Similarly, two geologists made a systematic study of
nineteenth century newspapers in South Carolina, North Carolina,
Georgia and Eastern Tennessee in order to find reports of
earthquakes. They found that by studying these newspapers they
discovered several hundred reports for felt earthquakes that had not
previously been recorded. They conducted both a continuous search of
issues of key newspapers and a specific search of particular dates
for different newspapers once seismic events were identified. The
authors argue that because “earthquakes and meteorite falls were in
the class of natural phenomena that included weather events, and
were generally of interest to the farming community. It should not
be surprising, then, that newspapers from the 1800’s contained an
abundant coverage of felt earthquakes.” 82 These researchers were
able to use historic newspapers to challenge some preexisting
conclusions about types of seismic activity in this area. Even more
recently, an article by Monika Gisler has speculated that historic
seismology could greatly benefit from more in-depth consideration of
historical sources such as newspapers.83
In fact, newspapers are often used as sources of information for
other types of historic natural disasters such as floods. In a
report for the U.K. Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, researchers
suggested that nineteenth century newspapers provide highly
descriptive reports of floods including information on earlier
floods and flood height. They suggest that “this information is
often vital if a ranked flood series is to be produced and local
newspapers can often be the primary source of information of floods
that occurred during the 1800s and early 1900s.”84 The authors also
cite online historical newspapers such as the London Digital Times
Archive as an important source that can make this important
information easier to find and more accessible. A similar study in
the United States revealed that historical newspapers are often the
only source for historical flood data other than FEMA, arguing that
“only in newspaper archives from cities and towns across the nation
might one find more complete reporting of historical flood damage.
Indeed, a newspaper archive could be the best source of information
on flood damage in a particular locale.”85
Historians Use of Digitized Newspapers
Although the uses of newspapers discussed here have primarily
focused on historians using newspapers in either their traditional
printed format or microfilm, there is a growing use by historians of
electronic primary resources such as digital newspapers. Very little
research has been done regarding the specific use of digital
historic newspapers by historians, and it seems even less research
has been done by historians using these tools. This does not
necessarily indicate, however, that historians are necessarily
reluctant to explore the use of digital primary source materials.
In a study done by Helen Tibbo regarding the sources most frequently
used by historians, she found that historians ranked “newspapers as
their most often used and most important source.” Tibbo also found
that many historians wanted more digitized collections to be put
online. She concludes that “significantly for libraries and archives
and especially digitization and microfilming projects, many
historians view newspapers contemporary to the events they are
exploring as essential.”86 Tibbo also notes that in her interviews
with historians many commented that period newspapers were the only
source of information for their work, and that microfilm copies
greatly aided their work. If microfilmed copies were of great
assistance, it is logical to conclude that digital copies of
newspapers could be an even further enhancement.
One historian made use of Accessible Archives digitized collection
of nineteenth century African American newspapers to assess African
American attitudes on the colonization of freed slaves.87 This
commercial digital collection includes full text of articles only,
rather than a digital surrogate of the entire newspaper.88
Nonetheless, Bankole correctly asserts that having these newspapers
available online has allowed greater access and much better
searchability. The digital format allows scholars to spend more time
using material and less time finding it. By having access to a
larger number of articles, she reformulated a number of her original
questions and also discovered a stronger sense of agency among
African Americans than she expected in the battle for and against
colonization.
Many tools are so new that the ways in which they will be used is
still being determined. One group of historians supported some of
their arguments through the use of fifty or so nineteenth century
newspapers at Ancestry.com. They did a keyword search for over 34
synonyms and antonyms of words such as lie, slander, and honesty for
they wanted to study the use of certain words to examine the quality
and type of reporting. “By using a search engine capable of
searching across several hundred electronically scanned newspapers,”
they explained, “We are able to explore a wide range of newspapers
for particular words to see if their use rose or fell over the
period.” 89 While this was just one part of their research study,
this use of digitized newspapers helped support their conclusion
that “the highly opinionated style of reporting that was common in
the 1870s had become uncommon by the early twentieth century.”
Although digital historical newspapers were just one of the research
tools used, they were nonetheless an important part of the author’s
research methodology and made their work much quicker.
Economic historians have also made use of digital historical
newspapers. A recent study of historical wagering on presidential
elections relied on an investigation of several thousand newspaper
articles, more than half of which were found using Proquest
Historical Newspapers. “The research in this paper has benefited
substantially from a recent research innovation, the ability to
search and access (via Proquest) machine readable editions of
historical newspapers including the New York Times, Wall Street
Journal, and Washington Post,” the authors conclude, “Our prediction
is these news search techniques will revolutionize the ability to
access diffuse, qualitative information of phenomena such as
election betting.”90
Another digital collection of historic newspapers that has been used
by scholars and students is the “Hawaiian Language Newspapers”
collection. This digital collection includes Native Hawaiian
language papers from the nineteenth century, including many
newspapers published by missionaries.91 It is not currently
searchable as OCR failed due to old and different fonts.
The creators of the collection explain that these “newspapers are
considered a standard for written Hawaiian which was nearly extinct
a few years ago, but has reemerged as a language of daily use and
scholarship.” 92 The website creators have received many emails from
users of their website, and the digital newspaper collections are
used in second year language classes. Students compare variations of
famous stories, study chants and genealogies, look at advertisements
and personal notices. Language teachers search for grammatical
patterns and can examine ways the language has changed. The website
creators believe that this resource has helped to revive Hawaiian
language from extinction through its use by dedicated teachers and
students, illustrating the importance of digitizing rare ethnic
newspapers.
Linguists Uses of Digitized Newspapers
Recently there have been several studies of how digitized historical
newspaper might be used to further linguistic research. Barry Popik
offers a succinct overview of various digital historical newspaper
projects, and how they might be used to discover earlier citings of
words and changes in regional language usage. He gives the example
of how one of his colleagues used Proquest Historical Newspapers
digital edition of the New York Times and found an earlier citation
of the word jazz than previously discovered. Popik hopefully
concludes that “the historical speech of New York, Los Angeles,
Chicago and all over the country will be instantly searchable.”93
One important feature Popik found with the commercial newspaper
projects such as “Newspaperarchive.com” is that they remain “small
town” and contain so many little papers from different areas of the
country that it has “become extremely helpful for the study of
regional American English.” He also makes the important point that
although these different digital newspaper collections are valuable
tools, the lack of standardization, and the lack of a central search
feature even for those projects made with the same software limits
their usability
Another linguist conducted an experimental research study using the
Infotrac Times Digital Archive and Proquest Historical Newspapers
collection. Donald S. MacQueen searched on the integration of the
word “million” versus “millions” into both British and American
English using these two newspaper databases. He argues that despite
some difficulties in developing a research methodology, the sheer
magnitude of the number of words that can be searched makes these
databases well worth using. One major difficulty MacQueen found was
that the searching defaults are set up with historians in mind.
“Historical Newspapers caters mainly to historians and other social
scientists who are looking to find as many references as possible to
a themes or keywords...” MacQueen explains “to maximize the number
of hits for such users, the Proquest search engine automatically
includes a plural look-up feature, conflating hits for the plural
form of any singular word entered. This obviously presents an
obstacle to linguists looking to distinguish inflected from bare
forms.” 94 Despite these caveats, he concluded that these databases
“offer invaluable information about language usage in American and
British newspaper writing across a period that is not yet well
covered by principled linguistic corpora”95 and they offer great
insight into understanding changing patterns of standard usage in
English.
Historical newspaper corpora might also be used to measure
linguistic evolution and diffusion over time. A recent article by
Gregor Erbach suggests that the growing number of historical
resources on the Internet, including historical newspaper corpora
and archives can allow “unprecedented opportunities for studying
language use within different linguistic and social communities.”96
The field of sociolinguistics could also make excellent use of
digital newspapers, to track when certain terms came into usage and
to explore changes in discourse. One scholar made an innovative use
of both library catalogs, and a digital full text newspaper database
to trace when the term “Holocaust” came into common usage and to
trace the development of expressions used to describe the Japanese
internment during World War Two.97 While this study does not make
use of a digitized historic newspaper, it does illustrate another
important research use of newspapers, to study how word and term
usage can be used to explore cultural norms and public discourse. As
Deborah Schifrin concludes, “sociolinguistics can contribute to our
understanding of history by showing how language helps to develop
and maintain a sense of the communal past.”
Newspapers and The Public Library
Access to Historic Newspapers
While historians are perhaps the largest community that uses
historic newspapers, they also serve as important source materials
for other groups of users as well. Perhaps the other greatest area
where historic newspaper use is seen is in the public library
environment. Librarians frequently refer to older newspapers as not
only one of the most important reference sources but also as one of
the most popular. Most public libraries collect multiple local
newspapers, and maintain back files for research use. Newspaper
morgues and electronic archives, two commonly cited sources for
older newspapers, are frequently inaccessible or too expensive for
public libraries, historical societies, and smaller colleges to
maintain or acquire. The answer to this problem for many years has
been for an individual institution to create a local vertical or
clipping file of stories of interest. This has then created the
problem of how to create an effective index to increase access to
these materials. Digitization can solve many of the problems of
access and indexing, and newspaper clippings files or indexes to
local newspapers are often one of the first things a public library
will put online in a local history collection.98
Public libraries have long faced the problem of providing effective
access to older newspapers, and many have only been able to provide
access to selected local newspapers and such major newspapers as New
York Times that are easily available on microfilm. Occasionally
libraries will maintain copies of newspapers in hard copy, but more
frequently they will provide access to historic newspapers through
microfilm. Microfilming newspapers, however, is not an effective
means of providing subject or author access to the content of
newspapers.
This problem of providing efficient access to the content of
newspapers has been addressed by libraries and publishers through
the creation of newspaper abstracts and indexes. The New York Times
was the first newspaper with an index, and many scholars and
librarians believe that this was what helped lead to the initial and
continuing over-utilization of this newspaper as a historic source.
While local libraries often try to create indexes for their hometown
newspapers it can be an overwhelming and time consuming task. The
importance of indexes to newspapers has long been understood, and in
fact one of the frequent tasks of the Works Progress Administration
was to employ out of work professionals in the creation of local
newspaper indices.
One article about such a particular at the Cleveland Public Library
in 1936 described four hundred people abstracting every news story
and local event in a Cleveland newspaper since 1819. The authors
argued that “the digest is expected to be invaluable as a reference
work since the volumes will contain what might correspond to a day
to day history of Cleveland, they will be of permanent value to the
historian.” They also suggested that the digest would be of use to
business researchers for “it will offer a wealth of information
concerning the background of industry” and that it would also
contain material “for students of economics, sociology, political
science and genealogy.” 99 This article demonstrates the belief that
research access to newspapers is important to a wide variety of
audiences.
Although newspaper digitization is still a fairly current
phenomenon, librarians have long understood the potential benefits
it could provide. At a 1995 IFLA conference, the advantages that
digitization of newspapers could possibly bring was recognized by
British librarian Geoffrey Smith. He aptly predicted that newspaper
digitization would reduce space needs for storage, allow both remote
access and multiple users to access the same materials at high
speed, and finally, that keyword access could “unlock the riches of
collection content.”100
Preservation of Historic Newspapers
While easy access has been one major issue librarians have faced in
creating collections of newspapers, another serious problem has been
that of newspaper preservation. In order to aid in the preservation
and finding of newspapers, the United States Newspaper Program (USNP)
was established in the 1980s to catalog collections of newspapers
throughout the United States and to preserve them on microfilm. The
emphasis on microfilming newspapers started shortly after the Second
World War and was ingrained by the 1970s and the start of the USNP
according to Richard Cox, an archivist at the University of
Pittsburgh.
The issue of microfilming and then discarding older newspapers
became hotly debated both within and outside the library community
after the publication of Nicholson Baker’s Double Fold, a highly
charged accusation against libraries. Baker contended that
librarians were actively destroying perfectly savable newspapers and
foolishly relying on microfilm to preserve access to these important
historical items.101 While microfilm is still considered the
standard preservation medium for newspapers, some librarians have
challenged its efficacy. British librarian David Stoker suggests
that using micrographic technology “when the rest of the world seems
to be moving in the direction of the digital storage and
transmission of texts” is not necessarily a cost-effective plan.102
He does argue, however, that the preservation of historic newspapers
is important due to the fact that many nineteenth century newspapers
are deteriorating rapidly. “Newspapers were never intended by their
producers to be a permanent means of storing textual information,”
Stoker concludes, “and the recognition that they contain a mass of
valuable information not available elsewhere, is only a
comparatively recent phenomenon.”103
Other commentators have also joined the debate on newspaper
preservation. Film historian Stephen Bottomore recently lamented the
destruction of historic newspapers. He argues that newspapers are
important sources for film historians because they contain film
reviews and biographies and “wider information about the social
makeup of cinema audiences or the details of how a particular film
was produced.” 104 Perhaps the most salient insight Bottomore offers
is that microfilm fails to capture photographs, cartoons and other
images with any type of visual quality. He cites a newspaper’s value
as a “visual and aesthetic object” and convincingly suggests that
microfilm will never be able to capture that quality. Bottomore also
mourns the continuing loss of newspaper clippings files as libraries
and newspapers have increasingly destroyed them in favor of
digitization or microfilming. He contends that he found many
articles in such files that he would never have found any other way
because the articles were from papers that had never been indexed.
Digitization could address this issue, although Bottomore suggests
in his footnotes his belief that mass digitization of newspapers is
an unlikely event.
The debate surrounding newspaper preservation has even extended
outside of the library community. An article published in the San
Francisco Chronicle warned of the deterioration of historic
newspapers and challenged the idea that microfilming was an
effective answer. The author argued not only that “many still long
for the authenticity of a real, printed newspaper” but that “not
only does microfilm fail to capture the wondrous texture and
sensation of the printed page, it can be hard to read or have
gaps.”105 This article points out that many people wish to peruse an
older newspaper simply to look at it and feel a sense of history.
While some have suggested that digitization when done well can help
to capture the feel of a newspaper far more effectively than
microfilm, for many there will never be a replacement for the actual
physical artifact. This love of older newspapers can be seen through
the success of a number of companies that sell front pages or copies
of older newspapers directly to the public.106 There are also
currently three commercial services that sell access to historic
digitized newspapers through a monthly or yearly subscription.107
Although the ultimate success of these commercial ventures remains
to be seen, their very existence does indicate the large amount of
public interest in older newspapers.
An entire convention was also recently devoted to the preservation
of historic newspapers. In March of 2001, a conference called “Do We
Want To Keep Our Newspapers” was held at the University of London.
This conference, organized by the Institute of English Studies, the
Institute of United States Studies and the Institute of Historical
Research, brought together librarians, historians and other scholars
to discuss why historic newspapers should be preserved and how best
to do this.108 This conference was largely inspired by Nicholson
Baker's book and the British Library's discarding of major
quantities of historic newspapers. In the opening session, David
McKitterick helped set the tone with an impassioned plea for
newspaper preservation:
It is worth reminding ourselves why research libraries collect
newspapers in the first place. Just
as with printed books, they are collected both to meet current
demand and because it is believed
that they will - some day if not immediately - be seen to be a part
of contemporary culture, and
therefore of local, national or international history. They may not
be used immediately, and they
may not be used for the reasons that may be anticipated at the time
of acquisition. But they
retain their contemporary resonance. To throw them away or otherwise
discard them is to
imperil one means of understanding the past.109
Other speakers such as librarian Karen Wittenborg emphasized the
point that while microfilm is not a perfect medium it has
nonetheless provided important access to scholars who cannot afford
to travel to original repositories. While she acknowledged that it
was important to preserve the “experience of the newspaper artifact”
she also urged caution in what she perceived as the rush to adopt
digitization. “If we have not learned anything from our microfilming
mistakes, we will waste enormous amounts of money and serve scholars
poorly.” Wittenborg concludes, “The digitizing must be done well to
be useful, and we must be able to ensure the preservation of
electronic formats that may be even more ephemeral than
newsprint."110
Despite the extensive discussion at this conference of the
importance of historic newspapers, McKitterick offers the somewhat
surprising conclusion that almost no mention was made of the growth
and advances occurring in newspaper digitization. “Clearly,
researchers are benefiting enormously from such technical and
digital advances,” McKitterick explains, “yet they still want,
understandably, to be able to have recourse to the original
documents and newspapers.”111 Despite the fact that McKitterick
suggests that researchers are benefiting from newspaper
digitization, the adoption of digital resources for primary source
research seems to be lagging behind the technology and content
available.
While digitization may answer some of the problems of preservation,
the changing nature of the newspaper and the newspaper archive as
they move increasingly into digital formats has worried many
librarians. The issue was recently discussed in the book Newspapers
of Record in A Digital Age. In this publication, two library and
information science professors discuss the changing nature of the
newspaper in an online environment and the impact it may have on its
use as a reference source. They fear that as newspapers increasingly
move their content online with no plans to archive past issues, an
important historical resource will be lost for generations to come.
Uses of Newspapers in a Public Library
While there has been a great deal of work done on the use of
newspapers by scholars such as historians, there have been
surprisingly few studies on how older newspapers are used by the
public library community. While there are many anecdotal statements
of the importance of historic newspapers, there seem to have been
few published user studies. The only study found in a review of the
library literature that documented older newspaper use in an
American public library was from 1989. A librarian at the public
library in Albany tracked the use of newspapers in their collection.
She found that the use of items from the retrospective collection
(older than 20 years) was clearly tied to titles that were indexed
such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and to the
timeframes covered by the indexes available.112 Such use indicates
that many people were unwilling to go through reels of microfilm
unless they had a specific reference.
Although there have been seemingly no recent user studies of
newspaper use in American public libraries, a number of studies have
been on conducted historic newspaper use and newspaper digitization
in libraries in the United Kingdom. A study was published in 2000
regarding the current status of newspaper digitization projects in
public libraries.113 Suzanne Mieczkowska found that only one such
project existed and that it had been undertaken due to a fire that
destroyed the library’s clippings collection. She also did a survey
of library users who used older newspapers. While most patrons
wanted titles from the last 10 years, those patrons that did use
older newspapers were most frequently searching for family or
personal history information. The only other significant reason for
use was access to non-property advertisements. One important finding
Mieczkowska made was that over 70% of the users surveyed would have
liked access to local papers over the Internet, indicating that
people might use digitized newspapers collections.
Similar results were found through several NEWSPLAN surveys.
NEWSPLAN is a project in the U.K. similar to the USNP that seeks to
catalog and preserve as many newspapers as possible through
preservation microfilming. NEWSPLAN Scotland did two surveys in 2002
and 2004 to study the use of historic newspapers on microfilm in
Scottish Public Libraries.114 They found that half of the users were
reading titles less than 100 years old. Of those users who were
seeking titles older than a hundred years, the major reasons for
using the newspapers were family and local history. Users wanted to
look at birth, marriage and death records. Other reasons for using
the newspapers included weather reports, shipping records,
information on soldiers, school board information, and gaining
insight into the Scottish perspective on major historic events.
There is also little research literature on how the digitization of
newspapers might change their public library usage, perhaps because
most of the historical digital newspaper projects have been in
existence less than two or three years. Nonetheless these sites are
proving to be immensely popular. The Utah Digital Newspapers project
has seen its number of daily visits almost triple in the course of
the last year.115 The creators of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle site
found that their website received more usage than they ever imagined
with an average of 60,000 visits per month.116 They also found that
the site’s users were from different backgrounds. The most frequent
reason for use was genealogical research, followed by historical
research, academic and classroom use and general interest. They
discovered that once the content was digitized it was used in a
variety of other ways they did not expect. For example, a grant
funded project to provide primary documents for K-12 students on
Brooklyn has relied heavily on their website. The creators of the
Brooklyn Daily Eagle ultimately hoped that their project would
generate discussion about “the role of the public library in the
digital world.”
The ways in which public library patrons use historic newspapers are
quite varied though several uses seem to prevail. Interest in local
history and in genealogy are the two most frequently cited reasons
for using older newspapers. This is not surprising as newspapers are
frequently cited by both local historians and genealogists as
important reference tools. David Kyvig who has written extensively
on doing community history lists a variety of ways newspapers can be
useful. “Careful newspaper research can pay rich rewards for the
historian.” Kyvig concludes “Detailed biographies may be found in
the obituary columns. Business pages provide descriptions of new
products, factories and business activities….Above all, the larger
context in which matters of interest occurred should become more
evident.”117
Genealogists and Newspapers
As indicated by the public library studies of newspapers,
genealogists make extensive use of historic newspapers. Websites
like Ancestry.com, Paper of Record and Newspaper Archive all seek to
capitalize on this market. No academic studies have been done
specifically regarding genealogists and the use of digital
newspapers, but one useful study considered their general research
habits.118 Wendy Duff and Catherine Johnson interviewed 10
genealogists, and discovered that they prefer informal sources such
as leads from secondary sources and colleagues. The most important
points of access for genealogists were names, dates, places, and
subjects. In general, they learned that genealogists desire lists of
names, name indexes, or search engines that retrieve by name.
Genealogists also enumerated the difficulties they faced in
distinguishing between different names, and explained that they
often used city directories to clarify individual names. The next
most important item for genealogists was the ability to do a
geographic search to find out where someone lived. They frequently
needed to consult maps or gazetteers to get town names, and wanted
to be able to link current place names with former names so that
they could use older names as search terms.
Genealogists make frequent use of newspapers to find obituaries as
well as birth and marriage notices when tracing their family’s
history. On the Internet, there are a large number of guides
regarding how to use newspapers for genealogical information, a
testament to their popularity as a source.119 In addition, there are
a variety of articles that have been published, largely in genealogy
periodicals, which provide insight into how genealogists make use of
newspapers.
In an article published in 1980, Irene G. Sniffin observes that
“newspapers in early days were the link to the outside world and now
provide us with a good description of the community in its time.”120
She gives detailed instructions on how to find newspaper indexes,
pointing out that “without an index, it would remain a hidden, or
more to the point, a buried treasure.” She also lists a number of
useful types of information that can be used to find personal names
such as judgments of the court and probate proceedings, both of
which often give family relationships. Sniffin recommends looking
for local post office lists of unclaimed letters to indicate if
someone has moved away or to search advertisements of local
businesses to try and determine an ancestor’s occupation. In
addition, she points to the fact that small town newspapers in early
America also frequently listed travelers leaving for Europe,
political committee members, and members of different parishes. She
illustrates that there are many ways of finding names in newspaper.
“Most importantly” Sniffin concludes, “by reading about the
community in which he lived, there is the feel for the time and
place of an ancestor. Thus biographical information can be obtained
about ancestors even though they are not written into town and local
histories.”121
Other professional genealogists have also published more recent
articles on how to best use newspapers for genealogical research.
The commercial magazine Heritage Quest is targeted at amateur
genealogists and family historians, and it has published a number of
recent articles about this topic. In one article Janet Elaine Smith
gives an example of how she traced an ancestor through the
newspapers and often found that the best information about their
life was in brief articles about events such as wedding showers and
a story about the death of child in a drowning. She suggests that
“by following the newspaper accounts of her life we learn both who
she is as well as a great deal of genealogical information.”122 In
another article by the same author, an example is given of how small
details in an obituary can help lead to other information such as
geographic details, family information, and other surprising
tidbits.123 Perhaps the most interesting example of using newspapers
provided in this magazine was an article by Kory L. Meyrink who
argued that ethnic newspapers can provide a wealth of genealogical
information about immigrants. Many people placed advertisements
looking for lost family and friends and often these newspapers were
the only place to find passenger lists, if no official list
survived.124
Professional genealogist Sheila Benedict has also offered some
salient advice as to how newspapers could be useful for research.125
She argues that researchers should always read multiple days of a
newspaper, to see if there were any corrections to previous
information in the next day’s newspaper. She also urges genealogists
to use multiple newspapers. Benedict believes that newspapers are
important sources, for they serve as “printed public memoirs of
community events” and they often are the only records available. She
concludes that to effectively use newspapers as a genealogical
source, they must never be viewed in isolation from other sources.
Genealogists desire for older newspapers is reflected in the nature
of public library’s local history collections. In a survey of the
literature on public libraries and digitization, it was found that
one of the first items that many libraries digitized were indexes to
obituaries or death notices published in local newspapers.126 For
example, the New Orleans Public Library (NOPL) and The Historic New
Orleans Collection (THNOC) collaborated on an effort to upload the
NOPL’s Louisiana Biography & Obituary Index, a database of all the
obituaries and death notices published in New Orleans newspapers
from 1804 to 1972. As a result a variety of access points have been
provided including a list of surnames and searching by last name,
first name, and nickname.127 Similarly the Utah Digital Newspapers
project specifically allows users to search individual newspapers
for names or keywords in these kinds of notices.128 The commercial
site Ancestry.com also supports proper name searching.129 Another
commercial site, Newspaperarchive.com, lists obituaries as their
most frequently searched topic.130
The commercial sites listed above directly target their services to
genealogists and family historians. Ancestry.com maintains message
boards so people can help each other with research, and there is one
dedicated to newspaper research.131 The majority of questions are
from people seeking help finding obituary information on a relative
or information about murder cases and other crimes that have a
personal connection. There were relatively few questions regarding
particular historic events, other than famous crimes or tragedies.
One genealogist detailed his experiences with using historic
newspapers at Ancestry.com and found it to be very helpful in
finding information. James Petty found that in searching for an
ancestor he found ten references, one to an obituary, several to
articles about the man and several advertisements for his business.
Petty suggests that genealogists need to go beyond their use of
newspapers as a source for vital records only. He argues that “the
newspaper was the extension of the neighborhood pub or quilting bee,
where gossip of friends and foes, neighbors and family, and anyone
who happened into sight or sound of the reporter was shared with
anyone willing or able to read.” 132 Genealogists should use and
read newspapers to understand the community in which their ancestor
lived, in order to paint a “true picture of who they were and how
they lived.”
At times newspapers can be the most important source of genealogical
information for a community. The daily lives of African Americans
and other minority communities were often left out of mainstream
newspapers. The director of a recently launched commercial project
that plans to digitize the archives of 200 smaller historic black
newspapers hopes to help address this issue. “Currently there are a
very limited amount of resources to go to, to trace back African
American families,” Mark Channing explains, “One of the best ways is
going to be these newspapers, because the focus of these papers has
always been on community: the births, the deaths, the marriages and
what not were heavily covered and that’s one of the reasons that
they have developed such a loyal following.”133
Genealogists have also shown a great deal of interest being able to
get access to digital images of documents and primary source
materials. Public libraries have long been sources of local history
and genealogy materials, and are increasingly digitizing their
collections as a means of increasing access and preserving fragile
materials. A case study was written about a public library in
Wisconsin detailing their efforts to digitize their local history
and genealogy collection and place them online. Materials included
directories, maps, photographs and picture books. They mounted files
as PDFs and HTML documents in order to make the process as simple as
possible and easy for other libraries to imitate. Such digitization
projects, these librarians believe, allow libraries to provide the
“building blocks for historians of all stripes and training to
satisfy a wide range of personal and professional information needs”
as well as allowing libraries to be “repositories of the collective
memories of their communities.”134
There is a vast amount of library literature regarding the building
of local history collections and one of the most frequently demanded
items is newspaper indexes to articles, particularly obituaries.
Many local libraries create newspaper clipping files to record all
types of events and they are often the largest component of a local
history collection. One North Carolina public library reported the
frequent use of their newspaper clippings file by those searching
for climactic reports which have been used in court and by both
historians and novelists to help set the mood of a particular
time.135 Genealogists and local historians are unable to use local
newspapers and clippings files effectively without some major access
point.
The digitization of smaller newspapers would help eliminate some of
these problems.
By making digitized newspapers keyword searchable so that notices
can be easily found, or by making obituaries or other notices a
specific field that can be keyword searched, this material would not
only be easier to find but it would also be easier to identify
significant patterns, such as trends in mortality, or changes in the
language of announcements that could be further analyzed to study
demographic trends.
Digitization of small town newspapers offers a wealth of resources
to the genealogist and the family historian. Local newspapers tend
to focus specifically on one community and are often the best source
for genealogical information. Many of the guides referenced above
included extensive information on finding newspaper indexes and
locating newspapers on microfilm. Digitization of newspapers would
greatly aid genealogists unable to obtain rare microfilm copies of
small town newspapers. By reading a local community’s newspapers,
many genealogists argue that they get a better sense of the time and
community in which their ancestor lived, often finding interesting
tidbits of information along the way.
In summary, there are all types of materials found within newspapers
that are important to genealogists. These include the following:
Birth, marriage and death notices
Memorials published on the anniversary of a death
Engagement or wedding anniversary notices
Social items such as notices of visitors from out of town or other
community events with lists of participants
News stories that identify events in which family members played
roles
Immigration records such as passenger lists for ships, or notices or
advertisements posted by recent immigrants looking for family and
friends
Legal information such as reports of divorces, dissolutions of
partnerships, tax lists, probate notices, land sales, and farms
sales
Military information such as news of enlistment, promotion, or
casualty lists.
Church information such as through the printing of parish lists.
Advertisements
Local government information including lists of who served on
political committees
Use of Historic Newspapers by Educators
While there has been little written regarding how teachers might use
historic digital newspaper projects, most of the creators of
different projects such as the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and the Utah
Historic Newspapers Project have provided various anecdotal evidence
such as grateful emails from teachers who have used their projects
in a class. More research will likely be done as the projects mature
and become better-known. Nonetheless, newspapers have been used by
educators for years. Simply searching on the subject “newspapers in
education” in the database Education Abstracts or ERIC produces a
large number of results. The majority of these lesson plans and
articles deal with teaching from current rather than historic
newspapers to promote civic awareness, political knowledge, literacy
or media understanding. Many newspaper publishers are heavily
involved in this kind of “newspapers in education project” and will
donate free copies of current newspapers to classroom teachers.136
In an article published in a 1980 issue of the History Teacher, a
high school teacher created a comprehensive list of the ways
historic newspapers could be used in the social studies
classroom.137 He used the microfilmed version of the Virginia
Gazette from the eighteenth century and had students use it in class
with guided exercises. This teacher also made the important point
that before sending students to use historic newspapers they should
have some knowledge about the general history of the time, the
structure of the newspapers, and the language that might be used.
Some of the many different subject areas he listed that could be
studied include law & order, entertainment & sports, class
distinctions, economic life, religious history, political life,
geography and the history of science.
More recently, an article by librarian Walter Minkel in School
Library Journal briefly discussed how historic newspaper databases
were being used in the classroom.138 His library subscribed to
Proquest Historic Newspapers-New York Times and he found that it was
used by teachers for various projects. The school’s theatre
department had students track changes over the decades in fashion
ads, social studies classes scanned back issues for political
cartoons, while another class tracked Holocaust coverage for 1938 to
1946. He believed that the biggest problem with the database was
that the search interface actually offered too many choices. Minkel
wanted easier browsing of individual dates, such as a student’s
birthday. The other major problem with digital newspapers was the
prohibitive cost, highlighting the importance of having access to
free resources.
Another educator explored the use of digital newspaper content by
having his students use the Virginia Center for Digital History’s
“Geography of Slavery in Virginia”, particularly their database of
runaway slave advertisements compiled from newspapers.139 Runaway
slave advertisements have long been considered important documentary
sources about the lives of slaves for they include information about
clothing, personal appearance, as well as special trade skills. This
database can be searched by gender, skill, and intent in running
away-offering new ways of finding information in these
advertisements quickly.140 Students used the ads to compare regional
differences in the ways slaves lived, draw information about slave
clothing and dress, and also learned that many slaves possessed
vocational skills. This teacher also provided advice for other
teachers on how to select ads for study and suggested that they be
used in combination with other primary sources. He concluded that
“with all of this information in a single location on the Internet,
students can ask their own research questions and search for answers
across advertisements (and other classes of documents) in ways that
would previously have been impossible.”141 By having access to
actual primary source material, students were able to draw their own
conclusions and engage with the past in a more meaningful way.
There are also a number of educational websites that provide advice
to teachers on using historic newspapers in teaching. The well
recognized website History Matters includes a “making sense of
evidence” section that presents case studies of how scholars use and
interpret different kinds of historical evidence. One guide is
presented on “How to Analyze a Colonial Newspaper” where a full
historical article is given to students to read, and then they can
compare their thoughts with those of a professional historian in
terms of the historical context and questions they should ask
themselves as they read.142 Another interesting example is a website
created by the Illinois State Museum entitled “Clues to the
Past—Newspaper Advertisements.” 143 This website includes scanned
newspaper advertisements from the 1840 Alton Telegraph, and includes
a series of questions for students to answer about goods and
employment. A similar example is an excellent educational guide on
how to teach from abolitionist newspapers presented by the
University of Texas at Austin.144 This guide includes a number of
recommended activities such as comparing mainstream and abolitionist
press coverage of events, exploring justifications for slavery, and
popular images of African Americans throughout history.
Ronald Zweig suggests that historic newspapers are an excellent
resource for teaching history because they place events in
historical context, describe them in easy accessible language, and
offer a narrative free of scholarly and textbook interpretations. In
addition, he points out that “the electronic edition makes a primary
resource immediately available; the student can trace the
development of events in his or her own way, creating his or her own
idiosyncratic linkages--and reaching his or her own conclusions.”145
The digitization of historic newspapers thus allows students to more
actively participate in the learning process.
While there have been few specific studies on teaching and the use
of historic digital newspapers, there is a great deal of literature
about teaching and the use of electronic resources, particularly
primary sources online. Many of the same conclusions about other
primary source materials can also be supported for newspapers.
History professor Mark Tebeau argues in an article for the Journal
of American History that the increasing sophistication of primary
sources online offers a new opportunity to refocus teaching
efforts.146 He praises the democratizing effect of this growth,
making primary sources available not just to scholars in archives
but downloadable at home and at school. As part of their
assignments, Tebeau regularly has his students search for new
primary sources online. He believes that all of this growth leads to
a number of opportunities including making active learning part of
the classroom by allowing for dynamic interpretations and
constructions of the past. By making more resources available for
teaching, teachers can expand beyond the textbook. Through
interpreting primary source materials on their own and in groups,
students are drawn into the processes of historical reasoning and
critical thinking. Tebeau also suggests that the growing number of
primary sources online allows for new partnerships between college
professors and high school teachers for shared curriculum
development. This type of collaboration offers challenges and
opportunities for educators of all levels, and newspapers could be
an excellent primary source around which to build a curriculum.
Uses of Newspapers in the Museum Community
While many other communities view the newspaper as a historical or
reference source, the museum community frequently makes use of
newspapers as objects for visual displays and exhibits. Some museums
are devoted to the examination of a particular newspaper while
others have focused on the technological aspects of printing and
production. Often museums use newspaper clippings as part of
displays, to illustrate a particular topic or to add historical
context to an exhibit.
Some newspapers have established museums that serve as a celebration
of their own history. The Scott Trust, proprietor of the Guardian
Newspaper, opened what has been called a “newseum” in 2002. It
serves both as a museum display of the newspaper’s history and an
educational center.147 Their main display includes shelves of bound
newspapers and walls covered with memorable front pages. There is
also a room used for temporary exhibitions and lectures that will
serve as a venue to discuss the press and its freedoms. A reading
room is also provided with an extensive back archive of the
newspaper. One target group of visitors is children because the
museum includes a schoolroom, where children are briefed on how to
put a newspaper together, such as doing research, interviewing,
writing and producing a newspaper. This museum’s use of a newspaper
is interesting for it combines a display of the newspaper as an
object, with the idea of a newspaper as a reference source and an
educational tool.
There is at least one other museum that is devoted entirely to one
individual newspaper, the Stars and Stripes Museum/Library. They
actively collect all materials related to this particular newspaper
including back issues, personal letters of soldiers and editors, and
other material related to the newspaper. All of these materials are
on display in the museum’s Missouri location. A research archive has
also been created as part of this museum.148
Smaller museums have also devoted part of their exhibit space to
local newspapers. The Edmond Historical Society & Museum of Oklahoma
maintains a permanent exhibit on The Edmond Sun, the local newspaper
and oldest newspaper in Oklahoma.149 Many smaller local museums and
historical societies often use the town’s newspaper archives when
seeking clippings to add context to historical exhibits, such as
illustrations of old buildings, prominent citizens or photographic
vistas.
A few museums that make extensive use of newspapers for their
exhibits are those museums that are devoted to printing technology,
such as The MacKenzie Printery & Newspaper Museum in Ontario,
Canada. This museum is devoted to studying the history of Canadian
newspapers as well as the larger history of printing. It has
presented various exhibits including a history of playing cards,
posters, and one on the history of several Canadian newspapers. Part
of their permanent exhibit includes original printing presses, a
newspaper composition room, and a large number of historic
newspapers.150 Newspapers also play a prominent part of exhibits
when visual artists made extensive use of them in their work. A
recent exhibition by the Sackler Museum at Harvard displayed the
newspaper clippings and photographs that Ben Shahn used as
inspiration for some of his paintings.151
The largest museum devoted to newspapers is the International
Newspaper Museum of the City of Aachen, Germany. This extensive
museum holds a collection of over 160,000 historic newspapers, which
serve as both a historic archive and exhibit objects. The website
includes a gallery of front pages of various historic newspapers.152
Their collection criteria include having at least one newspaper from
every region of the world as well as collecting first, last and
anniversary editions and newspapers with historic headlines. This
museum is devoted to newspapers both as a historic source of
information and as aesthetic artifacts. Special exhibits have
included a study of how death is represented in newspapers,
newspaper headlines following World War One, and a headline display
of German American newspapers. Their permanent exhibit includes
selected issues of newspapers that demonstrate how newspapers have
changed over the last 400 years, with a particular focus on Germany.
Newspapers have also been used by museums to help further their
understanding of the material culture of a particular time. In the
1980s, several Canadian museums worked together to create an index
of nineteenth century newspaper advertisements to try and understand
the realm of goods and services available at the time. This project
then evolved into a broader indexing and subject treatment of
newspaper advertisements and notices to try and help develop a
broader understanding of material culture. The authors suggest that
Of the primary written/printed documents available for the study of
material culture,
newspapers provide a unique and continuous source of information
about time and place.
Then, as now, they serve a wide public and motivate the mechanisms
of communication,
commerce and to some extent, social regulation. In so doing, they
provide a revealing
glimpse of an otherwise inaccessible range of cultural nuances,
including overall patterns
of material and commercial exchange which indicate a scale of
attributed value and available
resources.153
Newspaper advertisements are frequently cited as excellent sources
for museum researchers seeking to understand the material culture of
a time when designing an exhibit. For example, a teacher guide
created by the Northern Illinois University Libraries suggests that
teachers can use newspaper advertisements from the early 1800s in
Illinois to show “new stock arriving in stores, describe homes for
sale, and provide clues to trade patterns.”154
Challenges and Opportunities of Newspaper Digitization
Challenges of Newspaper Digitization
Historic newspapers are not an easy source to digitize; their
heterogeneous nature complicates the process. Although there are a
number of excellent digital newspaper projects that have made the
entire newspaper page image available for viewing155, a variety of
projects, both commercial and freely available have only digitized
the text of major features and articles not the entire newspaper.156
Professor Ronald Zweig who oversaw the digitization of the historic
Palestine Post argues that this lessens the values of newspapers as
historical sources:
Newspapers have always employed layout and typography to draw
attention to specific
information and to give emphasis to certain features of the news.
The page on which the
information appears, the position on the page, the size of the type,
and the prominence of the
headers associated with the article all convey information of
importance both to the
contemporary reader, and to the researcher in later years.
Consequently, the digital conversion
process must not only make the content of the newspaper accessible,
but also preserve its
visual form. Retrieved information must be presented in its
physical, spatial context so that
all information contained in the printed page be made available to
the reader-both the text
and its manifestation in newsprint.157
Being able to view the entire newspaper is particularly important
for media historians and communications scholars who study the form
of the newspaper, the placement of language, and the images used. In
addition, by digitizing the entire page image, researchers have
access to parts of the newspaper that have often been overlooked as
important sources of information such as advertisements, obituaries,
or the society pages.
In fact, researchers have often lamented that commercial full text
newspaper archives do not provide access to the entire content of
the newspaper, let alone page images. Two social science researchers
commented that while they enjoyed the quick access and keyword
searching provided by Lexis-Nexis, online keyword searches in any
newspaper collection can lead to the problems of “false negatives”
and “false positives.” In addition, keyword searching can be
problematic in older newspaper collections because “the meaning of
words changes over time and it is possible to conceive of keywords
which would produce ‘false negatives’ in one era but ‘false
positives’ in another era when a word becomes much more widely
used.”158
These scholars also echoed Zweig’s concern about losing not just
graphics and pictures, but also the layout of text. They assert that
the placement of a news story is crucial to some research studies in
terms of assessing how much importance was given to a particular
topic. They suggest that the relationship of the different features
on the page can be significant for many researchers. Interestingly,
they commented that while the use of microfilm was only one stage
removed from “seeing, touching and smelling newspapers in the same
way as readers experience newspapers,” they also felt that “the use
of computer searches means that no sensory experience is shared
directly with the persons reading newspapers for even the
written text looks different.”159 While these researchers were
speaking of databases like Lexis-Nexis which provide access to
newspaper stories removed entirely from the newspaper
itself, many current digitization efforts are providing access to
full page images. Digitization of an entire newspaper rather
than selected articles is important for it ensures that the entire
newspaper is available for viewing in its original context.
Opportunities of Newspaper Digitization
Providing Access to Smaller Local and Regional Newspapers
In the Newspaper and the Historian, Salmon suggested that
smaller newspapers can be used to understand social and
material conditions of local communities, and that a great deal can
be learned by determining what information is not included. A good
example of this is reflected in the work of one scholar who examined
four Oregon newspapers from 1870 to the 1880s and
demonstrated how they virtually excluded the Chinese community. None
of the papers included this community in the listings of births,
marriages, death, or society news. Chinese immigrants were described
in subhuman or derogatory terms on the rare occasions they were
mentioned.160 By including smaller papers in digitization projects,
libraries can expand the places scholars can look for primary source
material and historical evidence. In fact, many of these sources
have only begun to be mined for the information they contain.
Anthropology professor Richard Hitchcock has argued that since many
small local papers maintained exchanges with other local
newspapers and served as correspondents for major city dailies,
they also helped to establish important communication networks in
the nineteenth century. He concludes that “even the smallest
incident might receive widespread circulation in the state, this
fact must not be overlooked by the researcher who may well find
material relating to their geographical area in the pages of other
local papers or in the city dailies.”161 Hitchcock also advises that
effective research with local newspapers also requires
knowledge of the geographic area and of the national and world
events that might have impacted the study area. This point reflects
the fact that digitized geographic resources such as gazetteers and
maps could be helpful tools when conducting newspaper
research.
A study that surveyed how primary sources were being used and what
was wanted by researchers offered similar conclusions. The author
suggested that many scholars did not know what was available in
smaller newspapers due to problems with getting them on
microfilm, and explains that “researchers who rely on major
metropolitan dailies may not appreciate the enormity of the problem
for smaller cities and towns, yet much research with a local focus
depends on the availability of newspapers.”162 For example,
the editors of the papers of Frederick Douglass discovered that most
of the texts of speeches he delivered in opposition to slavery
appeared only in the newspapers of the towns that he toured.
Recovering those texts required extensive travel and greater costs
for the project. If these newspapers had been digitized,
gathering his materials together would have been much easier and
might even have facilitated the discovery of previously unidentified
speeches.
Expanded Access & Reframing Research Possibilities
Scholars who use newspapers have complained that their
studies have been limited due to access to relevant newspapers.
Several journalism historians tracing the evolution of the summary
news lead and inverted pyramid story analyzed 20 newspapers
from 1860 to 1910.163 Their research study was specifically designed
around the limits of microfilm. They studied every fifth year of a
newspaper and then analyzed seven issues for each
newspaper. They counted stories in each issue that used the
summary news lead. The researchers noted that they had access to
only those newspapers available in Los Angeles area libraries
on microfilm, and suggested that since they could only use major
newspapers a sufficient regional comparison would be difficult
due to lack of available content.
Similar complaints have been offered by other scholars about the
paucity of newspapers from certain regions of the country,
particularly Southern newspapers. In an article comparing editorials
regarding violence against abolitionists in Northern and Southern
newspapers, Jeffrey Rutenbeck apologized for his seeming
Northern bias and lamented the problems of locating newspapers
for the given period, especially in Southern states.164 Another
scholar who studies political violence and strikes argues that one
of the main problems in using newspapers to support his
studies is that the collections available to him are insufficient.
He contends that to do a sufficient study and ensure data
reliability “systematic periodic comparisons across as many papers
from different ideological and geographical positions as possible
should be made.”165 Digitization of newspapers would make it easier
for papers to be searched more quickly and a researcher would not
necessarily need to spend so much time creating a sampling
methodology and thus could spend more time reading. One remaining
issue is the inability to search across different collections of
digital newspapers at the same time
If more papers were digitized, scholars would have easier access to
more newspapers and could expand their regional perspective,
and possibly do more thorough comparisons. Scholars could view
historical digital newspapers online rather than having to
travel to distant repositories to scroll through microfilm.
Christopher Vaughan, a professor in the Department of Journalism and
Media Studies at Rutgers has made several excellent points about the
opportunities and challenges of newspaper digitization.166 He
points out that newspaper use in research is often based on
availability, which privileges proximity and causes a “certain
imbalanced cosmopolitanism.” In addition, the New York Times is
greatly overrepresented in its use as a historical source not only
due to the fact that it has an extensive index but also due to the
problem of presentism. Researchers project this paper’s current
importance into the past when there were actually other newspapers
that served as the “papers of record” for the time. Selective
newspaper digitization by major vendors such as Gale and
Proquest threatens to make this problem worse he suggests, because
they are only making available the past content of major national
newspapers such as The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and
the London Times. Librarian David Stoker offers a similar caveat,
arguing that “where historians have consulted newspapers in a
systematic way, it has tended to be restricted to those national
titles such as the Times”167.
Vaughan rightly suggests that the digitization of smaller and older
major papers such as the New York Post or the Toronto Star adds a
second national perspective but still leads to the continuing
domination of “cosmopolitan capitals.” He believes commercial
resources like Newspaperarchive.com, a digitized archive of hundreds
of smaller local newspapers, help to provide a “broader
vision of the digital past.” Vaughn also contends that by increasing
the number of available papers, “the contours of the digitally
available past are shifting, with implications for potential
patterns of evidentiary sourcing that are still developing.” In
summation, Vaughn echoes many other scholars who contend that we are
only beginning to discover the ways in which newspaper
digitization will change newspaper use and historical
scholarship.
Unlocking Newspaper Content: The Benefits of Computerized
Searching?
Perhaps the most important enhancement that digitization brings to
newspaper researchers is the ability to do advanced
searching, whether through keyword searching or the ability to limit
searches to particular news categories. Ronald Zweig offers the
caveat, however, that “searches of computerized newspapers
usually return so many successful ‘hits’ for almost any search query
that the researcher is once again confronted with the problem of
sifting through unmanageably large quantities of data.”168 He
suggests that current advanced searching techniques such as keyword
searching, proximity filters and Boolean operators are not very
effective unless the page of newspaper text has been
structured and segmented. While this type of segmenting is typically
done with newspapers digitized by commercial software
products such as Olive Software’s ActivePaper Archive and CONTENTdm,
this feature is not typically available with smaller freely
available newspaper collections. Some projects have used
optical character recognition (OCR) and proprietary segmentation
technology to make it possible to search not just the full text of
the newspaper, but to restrict a search to just articles,
advertisements or images. Other projects have simply used OCR
technology to make the entire text of the newspaper
searchable, without the ability to restrict searches to particular
news objects. A number of projects have created digital facsimiles
that only allow viewing of newspaper images as either PDFs or
TIFF files without any searching capabilities. In order to realize
their full potential, historical digital newspapers should
support keyword searching of both the entire newspaper and
individual news objects while also supporting the ability to browse
the newspaper by date.
Zweig also suggests that natural language processing techniques
could help improve newspaper searching such as “statistical
sampling of the retrieved texts to suggest alternative search
strategies”, an option for relevance sorting, the ability to
integrate thesauri, and allowing users to make search improvements
so that would “in turn allow the search engine to refine its
strategy by a learning process.”169 To date, it seems that none of
the currently available newspaper digitization projects have
implemented his suggestions.
Conclusion
Historic newspapers are used for a variety of purposes by a
large number of different communities. The creation of digital
historical newspaper collections will support a variety of
research uses, and may even be used in news ways as digital
collections mature and become better known. While many traditional
research uses by genealogists and historians will likely continue,
the creation of large historical newspaper collections
available as searchable XML files might also lead to new research
with more advanced computer science technologies such as data
mining, topic detection and tracking, temporal detection of events
and automatic summarization to name a few.
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