Searching newspapers across time

The digitizing of humanities-based research tools is opening up enormous new frontiers for understanding the past and informing the present. UGA history faculty are at the center of efforts to use Library of Congress databases of historical newspapers to allow scholars (and any citizens) to see how stories unfolded in the past:

“Every historical development has a spatial component to it, and often one that is central to explaining the ‘how’ and the ‘why,’” noted Claudio Saunt, chair of the Department of History at the University of Georgia. “With this new search engine, we now have the ability to see where newspapers were writing about a subject, and how interest in that subject changed over time. It’s a powerful tool for historians, and one that can shed new light on the past.”

A free service, the database is available at USNewsMap.com. It is based on data from approximately 10 million pages published in nearly 2,000 U.S. newspapers between 1836 and 1924. The newspapers represent what was happening in nearly 800 U.S. cities. More pages are being added all the time, though some states still have not contributed digital newspaper data and are therefore not represented on the project’s map.

One amazing thing about the under-utlization of digital capabilities is how much they can bring history to life. As much as the capacity for the astounding greatness of the internet collapses/reaches transcendance in the face of kitten videos, selfies and GPS-induced inabilty to get lost anywhere*, a network that let's us dance across time with the click of a mouse to learn about ourselves and our society re-invigorates everything about sitting in front of a screen. It becomes a tool for context and understanding, teaching, learning, instructing, devising new paradigms about who we are and where we are going. We've arguably made the greatest leap already, in being able to navigate clicks and touchscreens to find practically anything. Increasingly, so much more awaits us.

It's a new dawn for the humanities, and with our needs to understand the world at least as great as ever, history, language, culture and the social sciences will be central to that endeavor - as will the institutions that have fostered the expertise and infrastructure critical to their re-emergence.

*more on this developing tragedy later