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It's such a shame that recent historical newspapers are closed source in this way. We could learn so much from quantitative analysis of culture if there were do
by dash2 3y ago
It's such a shame that recent historical newspapers are closed source in this way. We could learn so much from quantitative analysis of culture if there were downloadable data or at least an API.
- dash2 3y agoJust to add an example: https://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/119646/13/WRAP-historical-analysis-national-subjective-wellbeing-digitized-books-Hills-2019.pdf https://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/119646/13/WRAP-historical-analysi...
- calvinmorrison 3y agoWell you can, go to your local library and look at microfiche. It's how we used to do it. Primary research. If you're lucky they may have OCR or a tagging system. If not, reels of microfiche
- jvan 3y agoMicrofiche is a small flat sheet, microfilm is on reels. "Fiche" being French for card. The More You Know...
- calvinmorrison 3y agoHuh! Til
- dash2 3y agoThat's not gonna work at million-scale, though.
- echase3 3y agoYou can easily find historical newspapers on archive.org. For example: https://archive.org/details/sim_los-angeles-times_the-los-angeles-times_1907-03-02/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/sim_los-angeles-times_the-los-an...
- dash2 3y agoBut automated text analysis needs OCR. There's https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov but I'm not sure how good its OCR has been.
- brewdad 3y agoI'm old enough to have visited a library and pulled old rolls of microfiche off the shelf to hunt for an archived news article. Being able to pull most of those same records while sitting in my backyard is pretty amazing. I do fear that too much of the modern era will end up locked behind paywalls and ultimately lost once private equity has no use for it anymore.