Circulations and Entangled History in 19th Century Chile

The Living with Machines Digital Residences have offered our research team a remarkable opportunity to experiment with methods for extracting data from historical newspapers dating back 100 to 150 years. This interdisciplinary project aims to expand the scope of digital humanities and historical research by developing automated techniques for data extraction and analysis; our primary goals included preserving endangered historical material, increasing access to historical newspaper data from the global South, and training Chilean students in digital methods. Our collaboration brought together experts from various fields, including mathematics, data science, literature, and historiography, making this a truly interdisciplinary endeavor. By combining these perspectives and adapting the Press Directories project’s structured text extraction methods, we successfully developed two viable pipelines to allow researchers to extract meaningful data from historical documents.