Bias and representativeness in digitized newspaper collections: Introducing the environmental scan

Abstract This article introduces the ‘Environmental Scan’ as answer to question of hidden biases in digital heritage collections. Its substantive focus is digitized nineteenth-century British provincial newspapers, and particular JISC corpus, a popular, publicly-funded resource for scholars. While multiple papers have meticulously investigated genesis such newspaper collections, process highlighting often unacknowledged politics collection, preservation dissemination via microfilm now digitization, our aim explore questions representativeness bias new ways by enriching computational analysis corpora with historical insights that can be derived from contemporaneous reference source: namely, Victorian press directories.