Beyond Budweiser - Creating a Digital Archive of Popular German-American Newspaper Literature

Who gets to be historicized by ways of (digital) record creation? Digitized C19 German-American newspapers in Chronicling America provide a fruitful platform both to (re-)evaluate stories about migrants that differ in gender, class, age, or (national) identities and to (re-)search how information spread across time and space. However, they offer no innovative methods to analyze the sheer bulk of heterogenous material. To foster further research in the field, we are creating an expanded version of Chronicling America's German-American newspaper repository. In this digital archive, users will have the opportunity to access a novel dataset to study popular newspaper literature that will expand and diversify the canon and history of German-American culture. The dataset will consist of approximately 500,000 viral texts ranging from "factual texts" about tips on how to nurse children, "short stories" by unknown female writers, to nationalistic "poems" about Germania that were previously computationally classified into genres.

Ein Beitrag zur 8. Tagung des Verbands "Digital Humanities im deutschsprachigen Raum" - DHd 2022 Kulturen des digitalen Gedächtnisses.