Media History Vol. 20 (2014) out

Media HistoryThere is a number of interesting journals that constantly provide interesting articles for historical media research and certainly one of the mandatory reads for every media historian dealing with the newspaper is Media History. The last issue, published 7 January 2014 deals exclusively with the topic of digitised newspaper copies, something that has been discussed in this blog earlier. The issue features articles from scholars and users of digital newspaper archives and also those who create these repositories.

The articles of this issue are based on a conference held 2011 in Sheffield and address the possibilities and challenges of working with digitised newspaper. Insights into the process of putting newspaper online from a developers point of view gives Claire Horrocs’ article Nineteenth Century Journalism Online – The Market versus Academia? Newspaper digitising can be done with an educational purpose and as a business, both are highly different in their aims and scope and she points to the advantages of a collaborative-based approach that enlarges the possibilities of working with digital newspaper.

James Mussell points to the limitations of search in digital archives as the content of the newspaper might not be as deeply accessible as possible. This, he argues, can occlude the search as restrictive search features can point towards false conclusions.

Further articles represent case studies of applied research in digital newspaper archives. John Lee`s article King Demos and His Laureate examines the impact of Rudyard Kiplings poem ʻThe White Man’s Burden’ and the different responses in the British and American press and also uncovers the clearly transnational approach in some of the titles.


Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.