Integrated interdisciplinary workflows for research on historical newspapers: Perspectives from humanities scholars, computer scientists, and librarians

Abstract

This article considers the interdisciplinary opportunities and challenges of working with digital cultural heritage, such as digitized historical newspapers, and proposes an integrated digital hermeneutics workflow to combine purely disciplinary research approaches from computer science, humanities, and library work. Common interests and motivations of the above-mentioned disciplines have resulted in interdisciplinary projects and collaborations such as the NewsEye project, which is working on novel solutions on how digital heritage data is (re)searched, accessed, used, and analyzed. We argue that collaborations of different disciplines can benefit from a good understanding of the workflows and traditions of each of the disciplines involved but must find integrated approaches to successfully exploit the full potential of digitized sources.The paper is furthermore providing an insight into digital tools, methods, and hermeneutics in action, showing that integrated interdisciplinary research needs to build something in between the disciplines while respecting and understanding each other's expertise and expectations.

Optical character recognition quality affects subjective user perception of historical newspaper clippings

“…Before discussing our results further, we would like to emphasize key issues of the work and developments that made the present study possible. As Oberbichler et al . (2021) indicate, it is vital to successfully negotiate both the challenges and opportunities present in typical interdisciplinary research settings.…”

“…Europeana gathered a selection of digitized newspaper content produced in different European libraries together, enhanced searchability of the content, developed an evaluation and quality-assessment infrastructure for newspaper digitization and created best-practice recommendations for newspaper metadata, among other things. Later research projects like NewsEye (newseye.eu, Oberbichler et al. , 2021), Impresso (https://impresso-project.ch/app/) and Oceanic Exchanges (https://oceanicexchanges.org/) have studied how to access, develop and enrich the contents of digitized newspaper collections.…”

Assessing the impact of OCR noise on multilingual event detection over digitised documents

“…Instead, he produces it by transforming inherited ideas, which may be concepts taken for granted in his culture or concepts developed by his peers and predecessors." Following this statement, this process can be viewed as an area where the identification and classification of events can contribute to the construction of more nuanced knowledge bases that could enable further data exploration and help to shape the humanities and historians' research [51].…”

Informaatiovuorovaikutus historian tutkimuksessa

“…Perinteiset hakujärjestelmät tukevat dokumenttien hakua vapaita hakusanoja, asiasanastoja ja taksonomioita käyttäen. Monia tutkijan hakutarpeita on kuitenkin vaikea kuvata yksittäisillä hakusanoilla, tai edes määritellä käsitteellisesti (Oberbichler et al, 2021). Käyttäjälle silti olisi tärkeää saada tukea monenlaisiin aktiviteetteihin, joihin voi liittyä aineistojen yhteiskäyttöä, tekstin lähilukua sekä inhimillistä päättelyä ja tulkintaa.…”

“…Kehitettäessä digitaalisia työkaluja tieteidenvälisenä yhteistyönä on tärkeää tulla tietoiseksi haasteista, joita tieteenalojen keskinäiset erot ja niihin liittyvät osapuolten erilaiset motivaatiot saattavat aiheuttaa (ks. Oberbichler et al, 2021). Kehitystyö edellyttää näkemyksemme mukaan käyttäjä-ja kokoelmalähtöisten tutkimusotteiden yhdistämistä.…”