Hunting for Treasure: Living with Machines and the British Library Newspaper Collection

Can I believe what I see? Data visualization and trust in the humanities

“…This involved trying to reconstruct earlier, sometimes opaque, choices behind previous digitization. Hauswedell et al (2020) point out that there have been few in-depth analyses of the processes and motivations influencing inclusions and exclusions in such digital archives, while Tolfo et al (2021) cite many other sources on the lack of transparency in digitization policies and the need for 'paradata' (Fyfe 2016) to account for past decisions. Online access to over 33 million newspaper pages might imply a representative selection, but is only about 6% of the physical newspaper collection (in turn an unknown percentage of newspapers originally published).…”

“…In our more recent work, we have directly addressed the problem of the mutable cultural object in two projects. In the British Library newspapers project introduced above, a complexity emerged that exemplifies the problem (Tolfo et al 2021). Newspaper titles undergo incorporations, amalgamations, and name changes through time.…”

“…For Burgess (2016, 83) the apparently familiar concept of provenance is as much about subsequently created (meta)data as the original object. Tolfo et al (2021) similarly demand early and thorough documentation of digitization processes, together with institutional capacity to share this information publicly. This has implications for our next recommendation.…”