Digitized Newspapers and the Hidden Transformation of History

Digitization has changed many aspects of scholarly research. While many transformations are obvious, some have remained under-remarked and under-theorized. One such under-remarked transformation is the availability of digitized historical newspapers. Millions of pages of newspapers from the eighteenth century onward are available for scholars and the general public to peruse. Many members of the general public use these sources for genealogical research. Meanwhile, scholars have used them for everything from a few citations to new types of digital humanities projects. To name a couple of examples, Kristi Palmer has traced the emergence of the term “Hoosier” for Indiana. An interdisciplinary team has created a database of newspaper ads around fugitive slaves in the United States. One of the contributors to this AHR History Lab forum, Ryan Cordell, has created an Oceanic Exchanges project to explore transatlantic reprinting.

Beyond specific projects, scholars’ use of newspapers as a source has increased significantly in myriad ways. Initiatives have sprung up to encourage more use of newspapers, such as the Black Press Research Collective. In 2013, Ian Milligan found that dissertations cited newspapers like Toronto Star ten times as often after the newspaper had been digitized. Some early career researchers are making digitized newspapers a central feature of their work. One contributor to this History Lab forum, Zoe LeBlanc, completed the first digital history dissertation at Vanderbilt University in 2019, using digitized records to trace media use in the Middle East. Meanwhile, Kira Thurman’s multi-award-winning first book started with digitized American and Austrian newspapers to find Black musicians in Germany, as German newspapers had not been digitized to the same extent. She then moved to archival sources, memoirs, musical scores, and more. COVID-19 supercharged that trend for basically everyone working on the eighteenth century onward.

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