Digitised Historical Newspapers: A Changing Research Landscape (Introduction)

The application of digital technologies to newspaper archives is transforming the way historians engage with these sources. The digital evolution not only affects how scholars access historical newspapers, but also, increasingly, how they search, explore and study them. Two developments have been driving this transformation: massive digitisation, which facilitates access to remote holdings and, more recently, improved search capabilities, which alleviate the tedious exploration of vast collections, opens up new prospects and transforms research practices. The volume "Digitised newspapers - A New Eldorado for Historians?" brings together the contributions of a workshop held in 2020 on tools, methods and epistemological reflections on the use of digitised newspapers and offers three perspectives: how digitisation is transforming access to and exploration of historical newspaper collections; how automatic content processing allows for the creation of new layers of information; and, finally, what analyses this enhanced material opens up. This introductory chapter reviews recent developments that have influenced the research landscape of digitized newspapers in recent years and introduces the eighteen articles that comprise this volume.