SHAX: The Semantic Historical Archive eXplorer

Newspaper archives are some of the richest historical document collections. Their study is, however, very tedious: one needs to physically visit the archives, search through reams of old, very fragile paper, and manually assemble cross-references. We present Shax, a visual newspaper-archive exploration tool that takes large, historical archives as an input and allows interested parties to browse the information included in a chronological or geographic manner so as to re-discover history. We used Shax on a selection of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ)—the longest continuously published German newspaper in Switzerland with archives going back to 1780. Specifically, we took the highly noisy OCRed text segments, extracted pertinent entities, geolocation, as well as temporal information, linked them with the Linked Open Data cloud, and built a browser-based exploration platform. This platform enables users to interactively browse the 111906 newspaper pages published from 1910 to 1920 and containing historic events such as World War I (WWI) and the Russian Revolution. Note that Shax is neither limited to this newspaper nor to this time-period or language but exemplifies the power in combining semantic technologies with an exceptional dataset.