Digitised History: newspapers and their impact on research into 18th and 19th century Britain

For decades, even hundreds of years after publication, researchers of all kinds have turned to newspapers for information relating to a wide variety of research needs including historical, cultural, social and political trends. The British Library Newspapers Online website, part of the JISC Digitisation Programme, aims to make this information available to researchers, who can now explore over three million pages of 18th and 19th century newspapers online.

This conference aims to explore the impact of the large scale digitisation of newspapers, considering the effect that this has had on research and researchers and the implied changes to research methodologies. Not only has the digitisation of historical newspapers made it easier to discover information about events from the past, but the way in which they have been digitised makes it possible to discover how those events were represented, debated and sold as news. It will debate current limitations as well as opportunities for future development.

The conference is being organised jointly by the British Library and JISC and will include a keynote talk, presentations and panel discussions with academics and other researchers. Registration is £35 (£20 for postgraduate students).

The conference will start at 10:30, with registration and coffee from 10:00. The conference will finish at 17:00 and will be followed by a drinks reception for all delegates from 17:00-18:30 which is sponsored by Gale, part of Cengage Learning.

Programme

Keynote

• At Sea: Illusion and Promise in Digital Exploration of the 19th-century Press - Patrick Leary

 Panel 1

• From Media Literacy to Digital Literacy: Using Digital Resources to Teach the Nineteenth-Century Press – James Mussell, University of Birmingham
• 'Stuff Happens': History, Evidence, and Newspapers Online – Laurel Brake, Birkbeck
• Datamining Massive Historical Text Objects for Fun and Profit – Tim Hitchcock, University of Hertfordshire

Panel 2

• 'No news hitherto telegraphed to London concerning Major Marchand can possibly be correct': researching transnational history using digital newspapers – Simon Potter, National University of Ireland, Galway
• Rogues, Ruffians and Villains: Researching Crime in Newspapers and other Digitised Sources – Bob Shoemaker, University of Sheffield
• Victorian news and newspapers, then and now – Miles Taylor, Institute of Historical Research

Panel 3

• Deciding what to digitise: a funder’s perspective – Alastair Dunning, JISC
• The Publisher Perspective: Insights from Gale – Jim Draper, Gale
• They had the Internet in the 19th century! How we improve access to historical texts – Aly Conteh, British Library

Plenary discussion

• Chaired by Joanna Newman, British Library