Of global reach yet of situated contexts: an examination of the implicit and explicit selection criteria that shape digital archives of historical newspapers

Abstract

A large literature addresses the processes, circumstances and motivations that have given rise to archives. These questions are increasingly being asked of digital archives, too. Here, we examine the complex interplay of institutional, intellectual, economic, technical, practical and social factors that have shaped decisions about the inclusion and exclusion of digitised newspapers in and from online archives. We do so by undertaking and analysing a series of semi-structured interviews conducted with public and private providers of major newspaper digitisation programmes. Our findings contribute to emerging understandings of factors that are rarely foregrounded or highlighted, yet fundamentally shape the depth and scope of digital cultural heritage archives and thus the questions that can be asked of them, now and in the future. Moreover, we draw attention to providers' emphasis on meeting the needs of their end-users and how this is shaping the form and function of digital archives. The end user is not often emphasised in the wider literature on archival studies and we thus draw attention to the potential merit of this vector in future studies of digital archives.

The value of mass-digitised cultural heritage content in creative contexts

“…The value of datasets are not pre-determined, in a linear value chain, but open to co-creation by others in a value constellation (Normann and Ramirez, 1998; Speed and Maxwell, 2015), beyond the institutional context. In doing so, it is important to acknowledge the tensions that exist between innovative research and development, community participation and commercial imperatives, particularly in the cultural heritage space where digitisation is often carried out in conjunction with major profit-making publishers, such as Gale Cengage, ProQuest, or D.C. Thomson (Hauswedell et al., 2020; Thylstrup, 2018). Such data will not routinely be available for the type of activities we have discussed here, restricting further use by the creative industries.…”

“…Such data will not routinely be available for the type of activities we have discussed here, restricting further use by the creative industries. Contemporary critiques of technology companies and business models that are predicated on the extraction, capture and monopoly of large data sets (Thatcher et al., 2016; Zuboff, 2015) also relate to heritage data, including who has full access, or how user statistics are being monetised (Hauswedell et al., 2020). Clearly as new products, services and businesses emerge that are based on the value of GLAMs datasets, it will be important to reflect on how these contribute to and sustain a wider cultural ecosystem in practice.…”

Text mining Mill: Computationally detecting influence in the writings of John Stuart Mill from library records

“…However, there are a variety of generic limitations to this research, which is dependent on a body of existing digitized content, including Mill's oeuvre, and the texts he read (even though we could not get access to digital surrogates of all titles required). Not all authorial figures have their writings digitized so completely, and therefore this method could be most successfully applied to authors whose outputs have benefited from prior digitization, building upon known biases within the historical digital canon which may have consequences for our understanding of the past (Putnam, 2016, Hauswedell et al, 2020. Digitization of cultural heritage content remains incomplete and uneven (Nauta et al, 2017).…”

“…It is difficult to understand how different our results would be with access to a full set of digitized texts, and we have to provide methodological explanation to continually grapple with incomplete corpora and representativeness (Bauer and Aarts, 2000). We are at the mercy of prior digitization activities, including quality control for generation of high enough quality OCR transcripts to allow even advanced NLP algorithms to identify potential matches, and little information is provided to researchers about the digitization process and how this may affect text-mining approaches (Cordell, 2017;Hauswedell et al, 2020). Researchers operating within this space should therefore do so in a critical manner to understand how the digitization process may be shaping their findings.…”

Disrupting the library: Digital scholarship and Big Data at the National Library of Scotland

“…Given current copyright laws and the standardised format of many nineteenth century collections, numerous data collections (and research projects) have a strong emphasis on this period, and with many other audiences holding a stake in the availability of digital and data collections, what could this mean for creative outputs, school learning, business analysis? In their study of newspaper digitisation practices Hauswedell et al (2020) set out a series of recommendations for digitisers, including 'engag [ing] in critical (self-)reflection on the implicit and explicit selection criteria that shape their collections', as well as providing information about selection rationale and funding, all as a part of the digital archive, rather than in addition to it. From a research perspective, Bonacchi and Krzyzanska (2019) note the 'duty [of heritage researchers] to study the ways in which heritage is made and assessed online' (p. 9), and the importance of the 'ability to provide counternarratives' (p. 8).…”