Tracking Discourses on Public and Hidden People in Historical Newspapers

This working group focused on information extraction on historical newspapers. Following an initial brainstorming session with the whole seminar group, we decided to narrow down the topic of information extraction to the more specific question of the coverage of public (notable) and hidden (non-notable) people in newspapers.12 From the historian’s perspective, it is difficult to identify and study groups of people who are not already notable for something, and work has been undertaken to develop approaches to represent the under-represented [2]. During the seminar, we built on the idea (and hope) that newspapers could serve as a source of stories about and insights into the lives of people who are not in the public eye. Given the group’s interest in working with real datasets and tools, we agreed to conduct actual experiments in the form of a case study to understand if our questions could be addressed in a practical way.