Historical newspapers are of interest to historians and historical linguists, as well as social scientists, ethnologists, anthropologists, media and communication scholars, and cultural studies. All of these are fields where contemporary digital resources, tools and methods (e.g. “distant reading”) are still underutilised. On the other hand, corpora of historical newspapers already exist for a number of languages and countries (Fišer et al., 2018, Fišer and Lenardič 2018) to a large extent, as they are out of copyright, and the images, and often OCR, are available via national libraries. However, these corpora are not interoperable, which precludes methods for their comparison, as well as any translingual and transnational research, an especially important consideration, as statehood and nationhood are highly dynamic in Europe in the period to be covered by the project corpora.

The proposed project aims to improve this situation by compiling a multilingual, comparable, annotated, translated and interoperable set of corpora of European historical newspapers fromaround the start of the 20th century. The PressMint corpora will be openly available, both for download in a variety of instances and formats, as well as via several on-line corpus analysis tools. 

More information available on the CLARIN project webpage.