Press Picker: an interactive visualisation tool that lets users scroll vertically through British Library newspaper titles, revealing their temporal coverage from the 1700s to the 2000s. Each row represents a newspaper title; red marks indicate available digitised issues. The tool exposes the uneven distribution of the collection across time and geography, helping researchers understand what is - and is not - represented before drawing conclusions from computational analyses at scale.
Abstract
This chapter describes how the Living with Machines project approached the British Library’s digitised newspaper collection - one of the largest in the world. Through an open-access digitisation programme, the British Library has made hundreds of millions of articles available for computational analysis. Yet working with this collection at scale requires understanding its contours: which titles are included, what time periods they cover, and where the gaps lie. The chapter introduces Press Picker, an interactive visualisation tool for exploring the temporal and geographic distribution of newspaper titles, and presents an Environmental Scan surveying how digitised newspapers have been used in humanities research. Together, these contributions help researchers navigate the collection critically, making visible the biases and silences that shape any large-scale digitised corpus.
Keywords: digitised newspapers, British Library, data visualisation, digital humanities, Living with Machines, Press Picker
Citation
Please cite this work as:
Giorgia Tolfo, Olivia Vane, Kaspar Beelen, Kasra Hosseini, Jon Lawrence, David Beavan, Katherine McDonough. "Hunting for Treasure: Living with Machines and the British Library Newspaper Collection". Digitised Newspapers - A New Eldorado for Historians?, De Gruyter Oldenbourg (2023). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110729214-002
Or use the BibTeX citation:
@incollection{tolfo2023hunting,
title={Hunting for Treasure: Living with Machines and the British Library Newspaper Collection},
author={Tolfo, Giorgia and Vane, Olivia and Beelen, Kaspar and Hosseini, Kasra and Lawrence, Jon and Beavan, David and McDonough, Katherine},
booktitle={Digitised Newspapers -- A New Eldorado for Historians? Reflections on Tools, Methods and Epistemology},
editor={Bunout, Estelle and Ehrmann, Maud and Clavert, Fr{\'e}d{\'e}ric},
pages={23--46},
year={2023},
publisher={De Gruyter Oldenbourg},
address={Berlin, Boston},
doi={10.1515/9783110729214-002},
url={https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110729214-002}
}
