Search

This contribution discusses the potentials and challenges of using digitised newspapers as a source in relation to other newspaper collections, digitised or not. The author argues that digitisation makes the pitfall of media-centrism even more visible and calls for an even more careful contextualisation of media sources. Instead of focusing too narrowly on a sample of seemingly “representative” digitised newspapers, digitisation may in fact invite us to multiply the types of sources and perspectives we include in our research. Dealing with such diverse sources, both digitized and non-digitized, requires that we highlight how we think about, construct, and analyse our corpus. Ultimately, digitisation can lead to a more exploratory and iterative research approach and thus an understanding of the research corpus as an evolving, interconnected, and reflexive collection of diverse sources.

This chapter discusses the open access digitisation programme undertaken by Living with Machines, exploring the range of constraints that inform digitisation strategies and selection priorities. Because the landscape of digitised newspaper collections is so complex, and research and digitisation processes operate on different timelines, we have focused on opportunities to make digitisation choices both transparent and pragmatic. Working towards solutions that reflect collaborations between library staff and scholars, we introduce: a) Press Picker, our custom visualisation tool designed to support decision making about digitisation; and b) the Environmental Scan, a process of automatic metadata generation from the Newspaper Press Directories, a contemporaneous record of British newspapers.