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19th Century News Coming Online 185

Posted by michael from the datamining dept.
mfh writes "The BBC is reporting that approximately a million news stories from the 19th century are going online. The project will cost roughly $3.6 mil USD (converted from UK pounds) and include 100 years of news and images from publications that are no longer copyright protected, and currently only available at the Newspaper Library in Colindale, North London. 52000 newspapers and magazines will be included and the project should take 18 months to complete. This is good news for Slashdotters, as this online archival project will provide a plethora of background material for articles and comments, and possibly pave the way for better online library projects with more current material."
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19th Century News Coming Online More

19th Century News Coming Online

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  • Ye Olde Slashdott (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 12, 2004 @12:31PM (#9407398)
    ... approximately a million news stories from the 19th century are going online ... This is good news for Slashdotters ...

    This story is a dupe: http://yeoldeslashdott/article.asm?yere=1842&monet h=Junius&sid=-524841

  • interface (Score:2, Insightful)

    by jdowland ( 764773 )
    If anyone actually checks it first, that is...

    Also, how useful the resource is will depend as much on the interface as the material.

  • Dupes (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 12, 2004 @12:32PM (#9407407)
    I just hope we don't start getting dupes from 1859 around here...
  • It's a curious subject, why are people so inclined to cling to the past? I guess this isn't exactly as case of that, this information can be useful for later reference, but it seems there are a lot more efforts to bring back the past than to think and look toward the future. What's done has been done, and it doesn't matter a whole lot anymore.
    • Becouse as the old addage goes, "If you don't learn from the past you are doomed to repeat it". That alone is enough incentive to study the past, with an eye to the future so we can learn from the mistakes of past generations.

    • The Past Didn't Go Anywhere (Score:5, Insightful)

      by freejung ( 624389 ) * <webmaster@freenaturepictures.com> on Saturday June 12, 2004 @01:11PM (#9407624) Homepage Journal
      "Somebody once said to me, 'why are you always talking about the past, you can't live in the past you know.' I said, 'well, I can go outside and pick up a rock that hasn't moved for hundreds of years, and bring it back in here and drop it on your foot. The past didn't go anywhere, it's right here, right now.'" -- Utah Phillips

      They say that those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it, but I think those who learn from history are doomed to repeat it anyway.

      "I think we can all agree, the past is over." --Dubya

      Seriously, though, the past is interesting because it continues to have effects on the present and the future. Also, because we can learn from patterns that have occurred in the past and from past misakes, so stydy of the past helps us to understand what's going on right now. I think a lot of people who want us to forget the past have very specific things in mind from the past that they'd like us to forget.

      • I wholeheartedly agree with you.

        The problem with those who repeat history's plunders (Dubya being the stark example now), are many, including:

        • The belief that history is not important nor relevant. This could be plain ignorance, incompetence, ... etc.
        • The belief that past experiences and lessons do not apply in the present and the future
        • The belief that one is "exempt" from the rules/lessons of past experiences. This is mainly arrogance.

        Dubya seems to be doing all that in the most excellent way...

        • Deliberate Deception (Score:3, Interesting)

          by freejung ( 624389 ) *
          The belief that history is not important nor relevant. This could be plain ignorance, incompetence, ... etc

          It could also be deliberate deception. Noam Chomsky calls this the doctrine of change of course [zmag.org].

          The content of the doctrine is: "Yes, in the past we did some wrong things because of innocence or inadvertence. But now that's all over, so let's not waste any more time on this boring, stale stuff."

          The doctrine is dishonest and cowardly, but it does have advantages: It protects us from the danger of

          • Very interesting. I may have thought of the concept informally, but did not know that someone like Chomsky has codified it into a doctrine. Thanks for the info.

            I liken it to the Jedi hand wave: "these are not the droids you are looking for!"

            The same doctrine applies to politics (specially foreign policy for superpowers / empires), as well as to multinational corporations.

            Time and again we have seen the lies: this corporation is now "focusing on its core business", or "avoiding the mistakes of the pas

            • I liken it to the Jedi hand wave

              Oh, no, it's not nearly as cool as that. I've seen that done, it's awesome and beautiful. The doctrine of change of course, on the other hand, is just an old-fashioned, bald-faced lie.

    • History is to the nation what memory is to the individual.

  • Should help with Prior Art (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Kr3m3Puff ( 413047 ) * <me.kitsonkelly@com> on Saturday June 12, 2004 @12:37PM (#9407439) Homepage Journal
    It might even help people find prior art for some of the goofey patents we get these days.

    • Yeah! We can prove that people got out of bed, breathed and thought long before these processes were patented!

      And to do lists...
    • It might even help people find prior art for some of the goofey patents we get these days.

      Hmmm . . . insigthful? I somehow doubt one-click checkout was an issue then. And even the patents for cold remedies have long since passed. This is just stupid.

    • "It might even help people find prior art for some of the goofey patents we get these days."

      Somehow I doubt anything horse or steam powered is gonna get MS's double click patent revoked.
      • Very narrow minded that this has anything *just* to do with the *one* MS patent, there probably hundreds of other patents, including ones non-software based, that might just show up as being before its time in the 19th Century. Of course, no-one knows...But you do not either, unless you have access to all this material and have searched through all the patents to have come to a different conclusion.

  • the ultimate source of yesterday's news

    • Actually (Score:2)

      by mfh ( 56 )
      I submitted this early yesterday, but I guess it got passed over. I'm quite happy Michael posted it, because it's about compelling subject. :-)

  • Murderous fun! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by FyRE666 ( 263011 ) * on Saturday June 12, 2004 @12:39PM (#9407449) Homepage
    Finally! We'll be able to scan through these ancient texts to find the original source of the hilarious "Just imagine a Beowulf cluster of these" comments, used in every single thread on Slashdot! How I laugh as I read it for the 14 millionth time!

    Actually should be interesting material there: Jack the Ripper, John Christie, Mary Ann Cotton etc... Yep, 1800-1900 was a good century for the UK's mass murderers.

  • Heh (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mfh ( 56 ) on Saturday June 12, 2004 @12:41PM (#9407458) Homepage Journal
    Before everyone gets carried away with the dupe jokes (as I am the submitter), I think it's important to note the cultural and scientific differences since these articles were originally written. To have a central online repository of this much data will help students to learn. Many students today rely on Google, but google is lacking complete works. Now Google will be able to index another million articles, and that means our knowledge and understanding of that era will increase as time passes. All other benefits are still important, but the student factor is, I think, the greatest part of this.

    Now that a complete online library is going online, perhaps other libraries will follow suit, and keep information free?

    • Re:Heh (Score:2, Funny)

      by jhujoe ( 579368 )
      Now that a complete online library is going online, perhaps other libraries will follow suit, and keep information free?

      You mean to tell me that previous online libraries were not online? No wonder they were all failures!

  • I mean I like pr0n too, but access to the vast libraries of historical documents out there strikes me as what we all thought would be accessible to us back in the days of Tom Swift.

  • Anyone ever read a small town newspaper? (Score:5, Funny)

    by iXiXi ( 659985 ) on Saturday June 12, 2004 @12:44PM (#9407472)
    I hope these stories aren't like the small town papers I used to read growing up in the Appalacian Valley. "Mr. and Mrs. Smith had dinner at old widow Jackson's house Sunday after church meeting. Her leg is healing fine. They sat around and watched Andy Griffith reruns and ate collard greens n' such." ..some of these small towns seem to be stuck in the 19th century. So, I would expect the mentality of the writers and editors of the 19th century to be similar.
    • seem to be stuck in the 19th century. So, I would expect the mentality of the writers and editors of the 19th century to be similar.

      Yes. I would say that writers and editors of the 19th century would be, by necessity, stuck in the 19th century.

      Just as I seem to be stuck in the 21st century. Dammit, where's my helicopter belt?

    • Presumably, many if not all of the archived newspapers are from major cities -- London, obviously, and also Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, etc. There will be an abundance of sensationalism (19th century journalism makes complaints about modern journalism -- charges of a lack of objectivity and the "if it bleeds, it leads" policy -- seem like a joke) but probably not the provincialism you're expecting.
    • I think this is moreso a matter of scale than a matter of journalistic subject matter.

      What I mean by that is, while it may seem a bit farsical that a small town paper would write, as you joke,

      "Mr. and Mrs. Smith had dinner at old widow Jackson's house Sunday after church meeting. Her leg is healing fine. They sat around and watched Andy Griffith reruns and ate collard greens n' such."

      What the journalist covering this is doing on a "small town" scale isn't so different from what many publications do on

  • Page 3 anyone? (Score:4, Funny)

    by colonslashslash ( 762464 ) on Saturday June 12, 2004 @12:45PM (#9407478) Homepage
    52000 free editions of Page 3 coming our way? Excellent!

    For non-UK ./'ers, Page 3 is a page in one of our more popular tabloids, The Sun [thesun.co.uk], that publishes a large picture of a semi-naked lady every day. In fact, Page 3 is the only reason anyone ever buys The Sun.

  • Prior art? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by StarTux ( 230379 ) on Saturday June 12, 2004 @12:45PM (#9407480) Journal
    Will all this information help with any prior art stuff?

  • RTFA? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Ieshan ( 409693 ) <<ieshan> <at> <gmail.com>> on Saturday June 12, 2004 @12:46PM (#9407484) Homepage Journal
    Millions and Millions of Articles put online that Slashdotters Won't Read!

  • Playboy? (Score:2, Funny)

    by TheMadPenguin ( 662390 ) *
    I wonder if they will be putting old Playboy issues online? You know... we only read them for the articles anyway...
    • You'll find them in your local copyright library, whatever the US equivalents are. A favourite pastime of prospective Cambridge students is to hit the library there (which takes a copy of everything published in the UK) and look up all the porn. Magic fun. Some joker's filed it under 'Syn'. Ho ho.

  • Oh come on! (Score:5, Funny)

    by 91degrees ( 207121 ) on Saturday June 12, 2004 @12:51PM (#9407518) Journal
    This is old news.

  • Oh, really? (Score:5, Funny)

    by ktakki ( 64573 ) on Saturday June 12, 2004 @12:53PM (#9407527) Homepage Journal
    This is good news for Slashdotters, as this online archival project will provide a plethora of background material for articles and comments...

    Inventor Eli Whitney Applys For "One-Click" Cotton Gin Patent

    Pianists Seek Curbs on Player Piano Technology
    "Roll Sharing" Circles Seen as Threat to Recital Revenues

    Unsolicited Telegraph Messages on the Rise
    So-called "Lard" Telegrams Now Comprise 60% of Traffic, Operators Say

    Utah Granted Statehood
    Gov. McBride Lays Claim to Concept of Statehood, Says Other States Owe $6.99 Each

    (I think The Onion does this better than me.)

    k.

    • Onion (Score:2)

      by mfh ( 56 )
      > (I think The Onion does this better than me.)

      Maybe so, but I still had a good chuckle! :-)
    • Pianists Seek Curbs on Player Piano Technology "Roll Sharing" Circles Seen as Threat to Recital Revenues

      Actually, I was highly amused to come across a brief article in a British newspaper ca. 1910 recording the arrest of some hardcore "music pirates" (it actually used that term, IIRC). Pirating sheet music, that is!

  • Circa 1860 (Score:2, Funny)

    by cynic10508 ( 785816 )
    Ye firste poste.

  • Something has changed, something not (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Maljin Jolt ( 746064 ) on Saturday June 12, 2004 @01:01PM (#9407574) Journal
    I have a bound tome of the local newspaper from the year 1905. Certainly, what a difference in culture 99 year ago!

    A top political problem in Europe up to that date was women wearing long pantalons in public and irresponsible aviatics flying their fragile machines above the populated cities.(sic!) All socialist parties, which are currently at the peak of power in majority of european countries were totally outlawed, and some their members executed, because of throwing home made bombs on politicians. "War to terror" was that called.

    Only things which seems to be almost identical to our time are media advertisings and patent issues.
    • I am probably missing your subtlety, but it seems like you are pointing out parallels, not differences. (As many geeks do, I have a hard time with the 'say something completely different than what you mean' type of humour, I just see it as innacurate, ;)

      A top political problem in Europe up to that date was women wearing long pantalons in public
      A big, recent political story in Europe is about women wearing veils in public.

      irresponsible aviatics flying their fragile machines above the populated cities.

  • Its a good start (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mikeboone ( 163222 ) on Saturday June 12, 2004 @01:02PM (#9407580) Homepage Journal
    This is great. Imagine having tons of written history available on the net. It would give those Google guys a challenge.

    Maybe there should be a Gutenberg Project for old newspapers and such. Lots of metadata for easy searching.

    One of the things that drives me crazy about all the stupid copyright extensions is the amount of recent history that could be digitized. Just imagine the interesting things to be learned from minor accounts from World War II and other events. Right now it's just rotting away on paper and film.

    Support the Public Domain Enhancement Act [eldred.cc]!

    • Re:Its a good start (Score:5, Informative)

      by nautical9 ( 469723 ) on Saturday June 12, 2004 @01:17PM (#9407652) Homepage
      This is a good time to remind folks of the Distributed Proofreaders [pgdp.net] project, now the largest contributor to Project Gutenberg, where anyone can take a scanned page and compare it to the OCR output to check for errors. Sign up and give it a go - all browser based, and actually quite addictive. :)

      Get involved and help keep out-of-print and out-of-copyright books around forever.

    • Hmm .. very small chance, but I wonder if I might be able to find any accounts involving my own grandfather, a RAF pilot in WWII .. that would be interesting (to me at least).

  • Homicide In Chicago 1870-1930 (Score:5, Informative)

    by AgentGray ( 200299 ) on Saturday June 12, 2004 @01:04PM (#9407593) Homepage
    This reminds me of a website that Nothwestern has opened that has most of the case files from Chicago homicides from 1870 to 1930.

    Take a look. [northwestern.edu]

    It's incredible. How did anyone ever survive the city during that time period? If you feel like doing a little sleuthing and completing some unsolved cases, check it out. There's solved cases there as well.

    It's a good complement to Devil in the White City by Erik Larsen.

    The other amazing this is that almost nothing has changed in over 100 years...

  • Preserving and making history accesible, good job! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by SoTuA ( 683507 ) on Saturday June 12, 2004 @01:26PM (#9407703)
    Great initiative!

    (shameless plug)

    In a similar initiative, the company I work with [newtenberg.com] has republished my country's first newspaper [auroradechile.cl], from the first issue in 1812.

  • i wonder if any of this will be useful in finding prior art to all the stupid recently issued patents:)

  • Interesting for researchers (Score:3, Insightful)

    by pedantic bore ( 740196 ) on Saturday June 12, 2004 @01:28PM (#9407724)
    I know some history grad students who killed years searching down old newspaper articles. They would have killed for something like this.

    • Yes - yes, I would have. Actually it was only for an honours thesis and the earliest year I was looking at was 1908. I hope to start a PhD next year but still the 19th century will be of no use to me. Damn you, British Library, damn you!
  • Jefe: We have scanned many newspaper stories for your slashdot background material!
    El Guapo: How many newspaper stories?
    Jefe: Many newspaper stories, many!
    El Guapo: Jefe, would you say I have a plethora of newspaper stories?
    Jefe: Yes, El Guapo. You have a plethora.
    El Guapo: Jefe, what is a plethora?

  • Um, yea... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Pollux ( 102520 ) <speter@@@tedata...net...eg> on Saturday June 12, 2004 @01:30PM (#9407736) Journal
    This is good news for Slashdotters, as this online archival project will provide a plethora of background material for articles and comments

    And we all know how much time slashdotters take to thoroughly research background material needed to create an informed and well-thought-out post.

    "Hey 3l33td00d, check out this post! ClearChannel just patented short-range FM Radio!"
    "Wait a second, hax0rd00d, acording to this Morning Post article I read from the UK 19th century news, there was this guy back in the UK who made an FM radio from a coconut back in 1894!"
    "Dude! You're so gonna get mod points on that one!"
    "Yea, took three hours to find the thing, but +5 is so worth it!"

  • Wait just a dang minute. (Score:4, Informative)

    by jdjonsson ( 592166 ) on Saturday June 12, 2004 @01:48PM (#9407874)
    I've been working on a project similar to this for several years now. http://www.digitalnewspapers.org We have nearly 200,000 pages online and searchable.

  • Had this for a little while now (Score:3, Informative)

    by mnewton32 ( 613590 ) on Saturday June 12, 2004 @02:36PM (#9408088) Homepage
    Paper of Record [paperofrecord.com] is a site run by a Canadian company showing off their digitisation software. It's a pay site, but I had a trial membership, and it's pretty cool. Lots of Canadian papers, but American and other foreign ones are plentiful too. All in PDF format, with fairly accurate searching.

  • Sad News - Abraham Lincoln dead at 61 (Score:4, Funny)

    by falzer ( 224563 ) on Saturday June 12, 2004 @02:52PM (#9408169)
    I just heard some sad news on wireless - Abraham Lincoln was found dead in a Washington theatre this morning. There weren't any more details yet. I'm sure we'll all miss him, even if you weren't a fan of his work there's no denying his contribution to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
  • I love the way the submitter underhandedly insulted the timelyness of slashdot maintainers by saying that this project would result in a lot of good material for the site...
  • Firste Poste!"

    heh - and it couple almost be true.... in that case.
  • What I find most interesting when reading old newspaper articles is how much the news hasn't changed. It seems that society continually struggles with the same old arguments, the same old social problems, the same old quick-fix schemes that don't work, the same diversions, the same old same old. I remember thinking to myself that news changes so little (with only the faces and names changing) that after witnessing about a decade of news you have no real need for anymore.
  • Surprised nobody seems to have pointed it out so far, but depending upon the format and licensing, this will potentially be a very useful corpus for researchers working in Natural Language Processing.
  • I'm not entirely sure that the lack of an online archive of 19th-century newspapers is the primary factor behind some Slashdot articles and comments not containing well-researched background information. But perhaps everyone here wishes they could do extensive historical research before posting, and finally they will be able to do so!
  • We were remodeling an old property I own and discovered that back in the 1930's era they used newspapers stitched together at the sides and covered with wax paper as insulation. When I finished pulling the papers from the wall, I had a good 3 foot stack of Minneapolis Star Tribune papers dating from 1929 through 1931.

    I had one heck of a time reading about Al Capone and his rise to power in Chicago... I read a lot of articles about the economy, as the stock market had just crashed in 1929 and everyone was

  • It would be very interesting to do research on how Britain got news about what happened overseas in its colonies.

    For example, was it an "Indian Mutiny" [wikipedia.org] or a "War of Independance" in 1857? (See

    Or, was Kitchener of Khartoum [wikipedia.org] a great national hero, or a staunch imperialist chauvinist?

    Or, how Thomas Carlyle [wikipedia.org] gradual decline from an iconoclastic liberal to a racist supporting slavery in his essay: "An Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question".

    Reading about all this from the time it happened, without th

  • it is about time! Thank you BBC.

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