I have been working on an interesting project for a few months now which id like to share with the world.
Old News:
https://oldnews.vjbe.net
Old news is a repository of newspaper articles. What makes it different from existing archives is that 1) it is open source 2) it is plain text and 3) each article (as opposed to each newspaper) has unique link.
I am hoping to revolutionise how historians cite primary sources. Instead of referencing a source as (Newspaper Name, date, page) and leave the user to go track down the original source using various (often paid, always proprietary) archives and zooming in on high-res scans to verify the argument for themselves, historians can now simply upload their transcription to old news and share a permalink, i.e (Newspaper name, date, page, URL).
How did I come up with the idea?
In writing an essay on the public reception of the Nebular Hypothesis, I repeatedly referenced James Secord’s Victorian Sensation. It is a terrific (albeit sometimes ridiculously detailed) book, but one thing I found quite frustrating:
When doing historical research, I don’t think it is appropriate to simply passively read a work like Victorian Sensation. In order to get something out of it, and develop your own opinions, it is important to look critically at the sources used by the author and see if you come to the same conclusions. Therefore, the bibliography is your best friend 🙂
Now, because of legal reasons, it is impossible for each bibliography entry to include a link to the appropriate book on Zlibrary or Anna’s Archive. But for newspaper articles from the mid-nineteenth century, there is no excuse for not posting an easily readable HTML document. Secord – you’ve gone through the effort of digging up this article, reading it thoroughly, and quoting from it to support a claim about the public understanding of science. Now why can’t you just transcribe the article and post it on your blog!
This is exactly what I decided to do for my own essay in the history of science. It draws heavily on 19th century newspaper articles, and each article has a link to an entry on my new website.
Right now, anyone can submit an article by submitting a pull request. I am not sure if that is the best architecture long term, because few historians are conversant with GitHub or pull requests. I am considering developing it further- for example by adding a form and automatically doing the transcription for you using my VPS, but I would first need to get some positive feedback before shoving more time into this project
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