Newspapers as Data: A Collections as Data Project

In an earlier project, the University of Arizona Libraries partnered with the State Library of Arizona to digitize Arizona newspapers for the National Digital Newspaper Program. The newspapers are now available open-access on the Library of Congress' Chronicling America.

This computational analysis project focuses on eight papers, including Spanish-language newspapers, newspapers of African American communities, and newspapers from predominantly white English-speaking communities, all located within the Southwest during two time periods: 1915 to 1922 and 1941 to 1959.

• Apache Sentinel and Post Script of the Apache Sentinel, published 1943-1946, digital files available 1943-1946
• Arizona Post, published 1946-2020, digital files available 1946-1962
• Arizona Sun, published 1942-1965, digital files available 1946-1962
• The Bisbee Daily Review, published 1896 (as the Weekly Orb)-2020, digital files available 1901-1922
• The Border Vidette, published 1894-1934, digital files available 1897-1934
• El Sol, published 1939-1981, digital files available 1942-1962
• El Tucsonense, published 1915-1959, digital files available 1915-1957
• Phoenix Tribune, published 1918-1931, digital files available 1918-1931

Newspapers were used as data to explore topics as part of students' assignments in courses during the Fall 2020 semester:

ENGL 696E: Archival Research Methods in Rhetoric and Composition

HIST 358: Natural History of Disasters

HIST 495/595: Archives, Museums, and Zoos: Introduction to Public History

JOUR 405/505: Arizona Student Media Apprenticeship

SPAN 350: Introduction to Literary Analysis

View the recording of the symposium.

• Newspapers as Data: Descriptions and Locations: Lesson to introduce the historical Arizona newspapers used in the project.
• Newspapers as Data: Context: Lesson about understanding key factors about the broader context of newspapers in Arizona, the scope of the newspapers, and what Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is.
• Intro to Text Mining: Lesson about text mining, word frequencies, and text mining tools. 

• Borderlands newspapers on GitHub: Includes Jupyter Notebook lessons and a sample data set of three newspapers: Bisbee Daily Review, Border Vidette, and El Tucsonense, 1917-1919
• UA Data Repository: Includes text data files of the eight newspapers used for the CAD project.

The Newspapers as Data Virtual Student Showcase highlights student work from several of the courses in which text mining of historical newspapers was incorporated.

Examples of text data mining:

• Benjamin Schmidt and Mitch Fraas. "The Language of the State of the Union," The Atlantic (January 18, 2015). 
• Lincoln Mullen. America’s Public Bible: Biblical Quotations in U.S. Newspapers.(2016).

Text data mining in Python:

• Quinn Dombrowski, Tassie Gniady, and David Kloster, "Introduction to Jupyter Notebooks," The Programming Historian 8 (2019), https://doi.org/10.46430/phen0087.
• William J. Turkel and Adam Crymble, "Counting Word Frequencies with Python," The Programming Historian 1 (2012), https://doi.org/10.46430/phen0003.