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The application of digital technologies to newspaper archives is transforming the way historians engage with these sources. The digital evolution not only affects how scholars access historical newspapers, but also, increasingly, how they search, explore and study them. Two developments have been driving this transformation: massive digitisation, which facilitates access to remote holdings and, more recently, improved search capabilities, which alleviate the tedious exploration of vast collections, opens up new prospects and transforms research practices. The volume "Digitised newspapers - A New Eldorado for Historians?" brings together the contributions of a workshop held in 2020 on tools, methods and epistemological reflections on the use of digitised newspapers and offers three perspectives: how digitisation is transforming access to and exploration of historical newspaper collections; how automatic content processing allows for the creation of new layers of information; and, finally, what analyses this enhanced material opens up. This introductory chapter reviews recent developments that have influenced the research landscape of digitized newspapers in recent years and introduces the eighteen articles that comprise this volume.

International audience; This chapter shows the contribution of digital technologies to the geographic field. Without trying to be exhaustive, it comes back to a set of projects developed in the field of population mapping for the last 15 years. It underlines how much geography, in its everyday use, was transformed by the development of IT. After a review of the history of computerization of the geography, we discuss two projects developed on different media (CD-ROM and Internet). The transformation of scientific dissemination is also addressed, since it is an integral part of the research process. Finally, we discuss a new project whose ambition is more important, that exploits the possibilities of the semantic web.; Ce chapitre montre l'apport des technologies numériques à la discipline géographique. Sans prétendre être exhaustif, il revient sur un ensemble de projets menés depuis 15 ans dans le champ de la représentation cartographique des populations. Il souligne ainsi à quel point la géographie, dans son usage quotidien, a été transformée par le développement de l’informatique. Après un retour sur l’histoire de la numérisation de la discipline, nous abordons deux projets développés sur des supports différents (CD-ROM puis internet). La transformation de la diffusion scientifique est aussi traitée, puisqu’elle est partie intégrante du processus de recherche. Enfin, nous abordons un nouveau projet dont l’ambition est plus importante, qui exploite les possibilités offertes par le web sémantique.

A data driven history? The close future of international history The data-driven world in which we are living is based on the emergence of large data sets, some of which may be useful for the practice of international history, if historians are able to broaden their methodologies. It notably implies the appropriation of the concept of distant reading. However, the most important question that challenges international history in the digital age is concerning primary sources, whether « digitalized » or « digital born »., Le monde de données dans lequel nous vivons engendre l'émergence de grands ensembles de données dont certains peuvent être utiles à l'histoire des relations internationales, sous condition d'un élargissement du canon méthodologique des historiens par l'appropriation de la notion de lecture distante. Toutefois, l'interrogation majeure de la pratique de l'histoire des relations internationales à l'ère numérique ne concerne pas tant les méthodes que les sources primaires, « numérisées » comme « nées numériques ».

International audience

The application of digital technologies to historical newspapers has changed the research landscape historians were used to. An Eldorado? Despite undeniable advantages, the new digital affordance of historical newspapers also transforms research practices and confronts historians with new challenges. Drawing on a growing community of practices, the impresso project invited scholars experienced with digitised newspaper collections with the aim of encouraging a discussion on heuristics, source criticism and interpretation of digitized newspapers. This volume provides a snapshot of current research on the subject and offers three perspectives: how digitisation is transforming access to and exploration of historical newspaper collections; how automatic content processing allows for the creation of new layers of information; and, finally, what analyses this enhanced material opens up. ‘impresso - Media Monitoring of the Past’ is an interdisciplinary research project that applies text mining tools to digitised historical newspapers and integrates the resulting data into historical research workflows by means of a newly developed user interface. The question of how best to adapt text mining tools and their use by humanities researchers is at the heart of the impresso enterprise.