Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore and analyze the digitized newspaper collection at the National Library of Sweden, focusing on cultural heritage as digital noise. In what specific ways are newspapers transformed in the digitization process? If the digitized document is not the same as the source document – is it still a historical record, or is it transformed into something else? Design/methodology/approach The authors have analyzed the XML files from Aftonbladet 1830 to 1862. The most frequent newspaper words not matching a high-quality references corpus were selected to zoom in on the noisiest part of the paper. The variety of the interpretations generated by optical character recognition (OCR) was examined, as well as texts generated by auto-segmentation. The authors have made a limited ethnographic study of the digitization process. Findings The research shows that the digital collection of Aftonbladet contains extreme amounts of noise: millions of misinterpreted words generated by OCR, and millions of texts re-edited by the auto-segmentation tool. How the tools work is mostly unknown to the staff involved in the digitization process? Sticking to any idea of a provenance chain is hence impossible, since many steps have been outsourced to unknown factors affecting the source document. Originality/value The detail examination of digitally transformed newspapers is valuable to scholars depending on newspaper databases in their research. The paper also highlights the fact that libraries outsourcing digitization processes run the risk of losing control over the quality of their collections.

Computers and mobile phones are piling up in archives, libraries, and museums. What kind of objects are they, what can they tell us, and how can we approach them? The aim of this chapter is to exemplify what an investigation of a hard drive implicates, the methods needed to conduct it, and what kind of results we can get out of it. To focus the investigation, hard drives are approached as records of everyday media use. The chapter introduces a computer forensic method used as a media ethnographic tool. Computer forensics and media ethnography are rooted in different methodological traditions, but both take an interest in people’s routines and the way they do and organize things. The chapter argues that a hard drive represents a window into the history of new media: into time specific software, formats, and media use.

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The chapter explores how digital graphs, maps and trees can reveal things never seen before, but how they may also hide all the manual work that lies behind them. The most basic rationale behind digital humanities is the idea that machines should do most of the dull tasks for us. If all the extracting, counting, matching, and plotting is left to computers, researchers can focus on the intellectual parts of the process, interpreting and presenting the results. In many cases, however, digital tools need assistance to work properly. This kind of manual or semi-automatic work may involve compiling, cleaning and filtering datasets, tagging images, transcribing texts, correcting bad matches, adjusting graphs, and so on. Yet, it is rare to see it mentioned when results are presented. The aim of this chapter is to describe and discuss the role of this invisible (semi-)manual work within digital research.

Biomedier 27 Den talande människan 31 Att handla med ord 37 Visuell kommunikation: Bilder, skulpturer och räknesätt 42 Från bokföring till bokstäver 45 Beständighetens medier: Sten, lera och ritualer 49 Imperierna knyts samman 54 Skriv-och läspraktiker: Exemplet Grekland och Rom 59 Sidenvägarna 62 Arabisk konvergenskultur 66 Europeiskt informationsöverflöd 70 Medeltida mediala samspel 74 Inkarikets knutpunkter 77 Tidigmodern muntlig, skriftlig och visuell kontinuitet 81 Multimedial fest -och vardag 86 En delvis ny tryckteknik 93 En tryckrevolution? 99 Den vetenskapliga revolutionens medier