Over the last few years you’ve enjoyed browsing and searching America’s historical newspapers on Chronicling America, but all the time you were thinking, I know there’s so much more I could be doing with this data. Well now’s your chance!
NEH has launched a competition designed to encourage you to “develop data visualizations, web-based tools, or other innovative web-based projects using a user-friendly Application Program Interface (API) to explore the data contained in Chronicling America data.”
Read more about the challenge on this website. The contest is open to the public (some restrictions apply, see Rules on the website) – enter as an individual or group. This would make a great collaborative project for, say, historians, social scientists, digital humanists, and computer scientists. Dig into the data and create something brilliant!!
To help start the cogs turning, here are some links to projects that have used Chronicling America data for visualizations, and also links to other data visualization projects, for inspiration.
Journalism’s Voyage West
From Stanford University’s Rural West Initiative, this visualization plots over 140,000 newspapers published over three centuries in the United States. A panel on the right provides contextual information.
Viral Texts
Mapping Networks of Reprinting in 19th-Century Newspapers and Magazines. From Northeastern University’s NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks, this project explores shared texts among pre-Civil War newspapers.
Visualizing Newspaper History
Created by a UCSD undergraduate in 2011, this animation uses 5930 front pages from the Hawaiian Star covering 1893-1912 period.
Visit the University of Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab to explore a variety of data visualization projects, some of which use newspaper data (though not from Chronicling America).
In October, the total number of pages available via Chronicling America surpassed 10 MILLION! And it was a Tennessee batch that took it through that barrier!