Enriching Europeana Newspapers aims to expose, via EUDAT, the existing corpora of historic newspapers created as part of the Europeana Newspapers project, including enrichments of these corpora in the form of detected topics and named entities. The work with EUDAT will provide another channel for the corpus to be discoverable by the research community (beyond the existing portal at www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/tel4/newspapers and experimental text dumps via http://research.europeana.eu/blogpost/experimental-text-dumps-from-europeana-newspapers). It will be of particular interest to researchers who wish to explore the corpus from a big data perspective, i.e. those who do not only want to search and browse via the traditional portal, but wish access to the full dataset for text and data mining. The Europeana Newspapers dataset contains over 11 million full text pages drawn from over 20 libraries across Europe, and approaches 1 terabyte of plain text in total. Over 40 languages are represented. (Note: the portal also presents over 11 million scanned images of the newspapers but these are not included in this particular proposal for the pilot). Many of the libraries are National Libraries, but some research libraries are represented as well. Most of the newspapers are drawn from the nineteenth and early twentieth century’s. Nearly all the text of the newspapers is in the public domain.

1. Enriching Europeana
Newspapers
• Nuno Freire,
Europeana Foundation/The European Library
Nuno.Freire@theeuropeanlibrary.org
• Clemens Neudecker,
Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin,
Clemens.Neudecker@sbb.spk-berlin.de

2. Europeana Newspapers
• EC-funded ICT project, 2012 – 2015
• 12m full-text pages & images for approx.
1,000 historic newspapers available online
– Project:
http://www.europeana-newspapers.eu/
– Search:
http://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/tel4/newspapers
– Europeana:
http://europeana.eu/portal/

3. The Challenges
• The Generic Challenge
– How to facilitate the re-use of Cultural Heritage language resources for
research purposes
– …by exploiting the existing and emerging European research
infrastructure
• How can the resources be discovered
• How can the resources be shared in practical ways for researchers
• How can advanced computation be applied to these Cultural Heritage datasets
• How can the resources and datasets be cited and referenced in research
• How can the Cultural Heritage institutions re-use the outcomes of research
• The Specific Challenges of the Pilot
– Creating best practice guidelines for the publication, citation and
impact measurement of cultural heritage data
– Enriching the corpus of historic newspapers via information extraction
– Showcasing the value of the enrichment by a quantitative analysis
– Working collaboratively between cultural heritage organizations and
researchers from computer science

4. Why EUDAT?
• We will be using the B2SAFE and B2FIND services
– These will help us undertake the enrichment of the
datasets and, more generally, expose them for re-use
by other academics from all areas of knowledge
– At present, users of the corpus tend to be ‘traditional’
historians who are familiar with the search and
browse possibilities of the Newspapers Portal
– Engaging with computer science researchers,
enriching and studying the corpus
– Connecting with the EUDAT services and tools

5. The expected future impact
• To gain a better understanding of the corpus
– topics, themes and subjects featured in the newspapers
• To improve the corpus
– re-use the outcomes of the pilot in resource discovery
– provide back value to the cultural heritage organizations
• To evaluate the difficulties and benefits of EUDAT
– Ease of technical interfacing
– In resource discovery
– In corpus uptake and sharing
– In data citeability
– for applying computation to cultural heritage data