This entry-level workshop, a joint effort between the Utrecht University Library and the Centre for Digital Humanities, is designed to assist participants in navigating large digitized newspaper archives. This session will walk you through utilizing the digital collections of both the Utrecht University Library and Delpher, supported by the text and exploration tool I-Analyzer.

Program overview

During the first part of the workshop, Arja Firet, DH information/collection specialist at Utrecht University Library, will showcase available newspaper corpora for research and educational purposes, demonstrating their functionalities while engaging in critical reflection. In the second part, a developer from the CDH Research Software Lab will give an overview of the necessary pre-processing steps for text corpora analysis in I-Analyzer. These presentations will be followed by hands-on exercises, allowing you to actively explore the digital newspaper archives and tools. The UB team can provide you with exercises that will teach you how to conduct your own searches, filter data, and generate custom visualizations, or you can tailor these exercises to your personal research questions and/or teaching goals.

Utrecht University Library collections

For several years now, the Utrecht University Library offers access to a large number of digital newspaper archives in multiple languages and from various countries. These archives offer a wealth of information, empowering researchers and students to gain new insights and identify patterns. Digital tools like Delpher and I-Analyzer can help facilitate the analyses, and enable a smoother transition between close reading and distant reading.

Delpher

Delpher, a freely accessible website managed by the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB), allows users to search through millions of digitized historical Dutch newspapers, books, and magazines. This extensive digital collection enables the analysis of large amounts of text and images spanning multiple centuries. Delpher also offers various datasets for scientific researchers.

I-Analyzer

Developed and maintained by the CDH Research Software Lab, I-Analyzer is a user-friendly online tool tailored for exploring large text collections. Researchers can use this application to easily perform full-text searches, filter data, generate various visualizations, and export subsets of data for further analysis using other programs. Currently available corpora in I-Analyzer include, for instance:   the Dutch newspaper collection of the Royal Library, ECCO (Eighteenth Century Collections Online), The Times newspaper archives (1785-2010), The Guardian-Observer archives (1791-2003), and the 19^th century periodicals archive.

Adding your own corpus to I-Analyzer

If you are interested in having your own corpus added to I-Analyzer, whether for general use or specifically for this workshop, please contact us at cdh@uu.nl to explore the possibilities.

Target audience

This workshop is tailored for humanities staff and students, but participants from other faculties are also welcome.