Interacting with digitised historical newspapers: understanding the use of digital surrogates as primary sources
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-04-2021-0078 |
| Published date | 15 September 2021 |
| Date | 15 September 2021 |
| Pages | 106-124 |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Records management & preservation,Document management,Classification & cataloguing,Information behaviour & retrieval,Collection building & management,Scholarly communications/publishing,Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information management,Information & communications technology,Internet |
| Author | Elina Late,Sanna Kumpulainen |
Interacting with digitised historical
newspapers: understanding the use
of digital surrogates as
primary sources
Elina Late and Sanna Kumpulainen
Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences,
Tampere University, Tampere, Finland
Abstract
Purpose –The paper examines academic historians’information interactions with material from digital
historical-newspaper collections as the research process unfolds.
Design/methodology/approach –The study employed qualitative analysis from in-depth interviews with
Finnish history scholars who use digitised historical newspapers as primary sources for their research. A
model for task-based information interaction guided the collection and analysis of data.
Findings –The study revealed numerous information interactions within activities related to task-planning,
the search process, selecting and working with the items and synthesis and reporting. The information
interactions differ with the activities involved, which call for system support mechanisms specific to each
activity type. Various activities feature information search, which is an essential research method for those
using digital collections in the compilation and analysis of data. Furthermore, application of quantitative
methods and multidisciplinary collaboration may be shaping culture in history research toward convergence
with the research culture of the natural sciences.
Originality/value –For sustainable digital humanities infrastructure and digital collections, it is of great
importance that system designers understand how the collections are accessed, whyand their use in the real-
world context. The study enriches understanding of the collections’utilisation and advances a theoretical
framework for explicating task-based information interaction.
Keywords Newspapers, Digital libraries, User studies, Behaviour, Task analysis, History, Task based
information interaction
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
If we are to design sustainable digital humanities infrastructure and digital collections, it is
highly important to understand how and why these systems are accessed and used, in real-
world context. Otherwise, some crucial aspects of work practices that shape the digital tools’
and platforms’use could get ignored. To address this issue, we conducted a qualitative
research aimed at providing a user-centred picture of digitalised historical newspapers’
utilisation that covers all activities involved in the research process.
Digital texts have become integral to research in the humanities and history (Late et al.,
2019;Sinn and Soares, 2014). With the digitisation of the materials have come concepts such
as the digital historian, digital history (Crymble, 2021;Gregory, 2014) and computational
history (Nanetti and Cheong, 2018). They involve applying digital materials and/or
JD
78,7
106
© Elina Late and Sanna Kumpulainen. Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This article is
published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce,
distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial
purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence
may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode
This research was funded by Academy of Finland grant #326612. The authors thank Laura
Korkeam€
aki for providing research data for the purposes of this study.
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/0022-0418.htm
Received 9 April 2021
Revised 1 July 2021
Accepted 4 July 2021
Journal of Documentation
Vol. 78 No. 7, 2022
pp. 106-124
Emerald Publishing Limited
0022-0418
DOI 10.1108/JD-04-2021-0078
computational methods in research. Multidisciplinary research work involving fields such as
computer science characterises many of the new digital research methods. Historians’
traditional individual-oriented research practices have given way to more collaborative
efforts (Given and Willson, 2018).
The start of the 21st century has seen public and private organisations around the world
digitalise historical newspapers (Gooding, 2016a;Mussell, 2012). This digitisation has
influenced the work of historians in at least two ways. Firstly, most of the collections display
ubiquitous availability: historians can use them from their own devices, at any site. Secondly,
many user interfaces serving as a gateway to digital newspaper collections offer advanced
techniques for searching and analysing the contents. The standard procedure of optical
character recognition (OCR) enables instant text search. In addition to basic full-text and
keyword-based search, typical functions include providing metadata, browsing and filtering
of results. The most advanced interfaces offer functionality for user interaction (e.g. saving of
articles to “Favourites”), content enrichment (e.g. post-OCR correction), connectivity (e.g.
links to other repositories) and code extensions and APIs (Ehrmann et al., 2019).
Most studies of historians’information-related practices have focused on the use of
archival materials in general (Toms and O’Brien, 2008). There is a dearth of research into the
real-world utilisation of digital collections (Allen and Sieczkiewicz, 2010;Bulger et al., 2011;
Hughes, 2012a;Meyer et al., 2009;Sinn and Soares, 2014). Among others (e.g. Bulger et al.,
2011;Warwick et al., 2008), Gooding (2016a,b) has appealed for qualitative research, to inform
our understanding of scholars’practices in the digital world. We set out to address this
research gap and study qualitatively history scholars’information interactions in the realm of
Finnish digital newspapers and their use as primary research sources –that is, as sources of
research data that provide first-hand testimony or direct evidence pertaining to the topic
under historical investigation.
We analysed material from qualitative interviews by means of a model for evaluation of
task-based information interaction (J€
arvelin et al., 2015) that enables studying how a given
digital collection is used in varying task activities during the research process. It is widely
agreed that information behaviours do not occur in a vacuum; they stem from the larger
motivating tasks (Toms, 2011).
We begin by discussing previous research focusing on historians’information practices.
Then, we present the framework for our examination of task-based information interaction
and describe the research setting, along with the data-collection process and the analyses
conducted. With these foundations in place, we proceed to the results and lay out some
discussion and our conclusions.
Historians’information practices in a digital information environment
The increased usage and ongoing development of technological tools for humanities research has
changed history scholars’ways of working over the past decade (Baruchson–Arbib and
Bronstein, 2007;Given and Willson, 2018;Toms and O’Brien, 2008). This change has not been
entirely smooth. For example, while Burton (2005) noted that mainstream academic historical
journals began to accept digital content as a part of their publication in around 2000, work with
digital formats has not been rewarded in the same way as that with more traditional forms of
history scholarship (Clement and Carter, 2017). Also, some scholars have expressed concern about
the impact of digital technologies on reading: printed texts have been seen as more engaging for
deep reading than digital ones are (e.g. Carr, 2010). Nevertheless, digital collectionsare here to stay,
and many historians already see them as essential for conducting research (Sinn and Soares, 2014).
Several scholars have delved into how historians seek and locate primary source materials
(Anderson, 2004;Duff and Johnson, 2002;Tibbo, 2002). They report on the variety of sources
used in history research processes, and they point out a need to assess what the users want
and need, and how primary sources are searched for.
Digitised
historical
newspapers
107
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