NewsEye: A Digital Investigator for Historical Newspapers

The poster aims at presenting the activities of the project as well as the results produced during its two first years.

NewsEye is a European 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 data, 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.

The 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 broadly,
• 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 analysing historical assets with new methods across different language corpora.

Funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, NewsEye is coordinated by the University of La Rochelle (France) and will last until May 2021.