Improving Access to Digitized Historical Newspapers with Text Mining, Coordinated Models, and Formative User Interface Design

Most tools for accessing digitized historical newspapers emphasize relatively simple search; but, as increasing numbers of digitized historical newspapers and other historical resources become available, we can consider much richer modes of interaction with these collections. For instance, users might use exploratory search for looking at larger issues and events such as elections and campaigns or to get a sense of “the texture of the city... how the city was thinking.” To take full advantage of rich interface tools, the content of the newspapers needs to be described systematically and accurately. Moreover, collections of multiple newspapers need to be richly cross-indexed across titles and even with historical resources beyond the newspapers.