Month: October 2014

Looking for a last-minute Halloween costume idea? Check out the Philadelphia Public Ledger from 100 years ago! (click on image above)

For more newspaper features about old Halloween customs, visit the Library of Congress Topics in Chronicling America page. Read all about the holiday’s old traditions, such as rituals carried out by young ladies in the hope of revealing the face of their future husband:

Disclaimer: we cannot be held responsible for any bodily harm you may come to if you seriously decide to attempt this nonsense!

Join Louisa Trott, TNDP Project Coordinator, for a FREE Brown Bag lecture at the East Tennessee History Center this Wednesday: From Rags to Pixels: East Tennessee’s Newspapers from the 19th Century to Digitization.
Louisa will talk about the Tennessee Newspaper Digitization Project and share some of the intriguing stories found in East Tennessee’s 19th century newspapers.
Wednesday Oct 29 – noon
East Tennessee History Center, 601 S. Gay Street, Knoxville

More often than not, jokes in 19th century newspapers leave modern readers scratching their heads rather than splitting their sides.

The Victorian Meme Machine is a new project that will attempt to entice a 21st century audience into seeing the funny side of Victorian humor.

“A collaboration between the British Library Labs and Dr Bob Nicholson (Edge Hill University), the project will create an extensive database of Victorian jokes and then experiment with ways to recirculate them out over social media.” Source: British Library’s Digital Scholarship blog

Sounds like a laugh? Find an introduction to the project here or watch this video presentation.

This is a wonderful example of how digitized newspapers are being used for data mining. I’d love to hear from anyone with ideas for data mining Tennessee’s digitized newspapers!

Thanks to our friend Jenni Salamon of the Ohio Digital Newspaper Program for telling us about this project.