NewsEye: A Digital Investigator for Historical Newspapers

Goal and tasks

The NewsEye project involves national libraries, humanities and social science research groups and computer science research groups. It addresses a number of challenges, which will result in significant scientific advances, in several directions:
• in text recognition, text analysis, natural language processing, computational creativity and natural language generation, with regard to historical newspapers but also more universally,
• in digital newspaper research, addressing a number of editorial issues like OCR and article separation,
• in digital humanities, in respect to huge amounts of text material, availability of useful tools and possibilities of searching and browsing,
• in history, in terms of analyzing historical assets with new methods across different language corpora.
NewsEye, funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, is a research project advancing the state of the art and introducing new concepts, methods and tools for digital humanities by providing enhanced access to historical newspapers for a wide range of users. With the tools and methods created by NewsEye, crucial user groups will be able to investigate views and perspectives on historical events and development and, as a consequence, the project will change the way European digital heritage data is (re)searched, accessed, used and analysed. NewsEye will develop a seamlessly integrated armoury of tools and methods will be created that will improve users’ capability to access, analyse and use the content in the digital Libraries of historical newspapers.
The National Library of Finland will provide the project with newspaper data until 1918 and test the developing tools for research and other use. In addition the Library cooperates with other national libraries in disseminating the project’s results.