Digitised History: newspapers and their impact on research into 18th and 19th century Britain
By Claire S Ross, on 12 July 2010
Coming up next week is the jointly organised Digitised History Conference by the British Library and JISC, focusing on 18th and 19th century Newspapers and their impact. Claire Warwick will be taking part in the event and will be part of the final discussion panel.
Event Details:
For decades, even hundreds of years after publication, researchers of all kinds have turned to newspapers for information relating to a wide variety of research needs including historical, cultural, social and political trends. The British Library Newspapers Online website, part of the JISC Digitisation Programme, aims to make this information available to researchers, who can now explore over three million pages of 18th and 19th century newspapers online.
The conference aims to explore the impact of the large scale digitisation of newspapers, considering the effect that this has had on research and researchers and the implied changes to research methodologies. Not only has the digitisation of historical newspapers made it easier to discover information about events from the past, but the way in which they have been digitised makes it possible to discover how those events were represented, debated and sold as news. It will debate current limitations as well as opportunities for future development.
Confirmed speakers include: Laurel Brake, Aly Conteh, Jim Draper, Alistair Dunning, Tim Hitchcock, Jim Mussell, Simon Potter, Miles Taylor and Bob Shoemaker. They will be talking about a wide range of topics including: Deciding what to digitise: a funder’s perspective, Using Digital Resources to Teach the Nineteenth-Century Press, Victorian newspapers, then and now and Researching transnational history using digital newspapers: the case of the British Empire.
For more details on the programme and registration please visit http://www.history.ac.uk/events/conferences/1157