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.
