Slashdot Mirror
19th Century News Coming Online
mfh writes "The BBC is reporting that approximately a million news stories from the 19th century are going online. The project will cost roughly $3.6 mil USD (converted from UK pounds) and include 100 years of news and images from publications that are no longer copyright protected, and currently only available at the Newspaper Library in Colindale, North London. 52000 newspapers and magazines will be included and the project should take 18 months to complete. This is good news for Slashdotters, as this online archival project will provide a plethora of background material for articles and comments, and possibly pave the way for better online library projects with more current material."
... approximately a million news stories from the 19th century are going online ... This is good news for Slashdotters ...
t h=Junius&sid=-524841
This story is a dupe: http://yeoldeslashdott/article.asm?yere=1842&mone
If anyone actually checks it first, that is...
Also, how useful the resource is will depend as much on the interface as the material.
I just hope we don't start getting dupes from 1859 around here...
Lexis-Nexis, Wikipedia, etc? http://www.wikipedia.com http://www.lexisnexis.com/ You can find out just about um... anything from the above mentioned sources. While this is VERY cool, as it allows for an unprecedented amount of information to be centralized, can it be more FOCUSED than the news filters/encyclopedias listed above? I suppose only time will tell.
Now we have over 100 years of repeat stories to run! ;)
Sorry, but I think M$ft has already has filed a patent on this. Of course we won't be able to learn from history, unless for a very very small fee we pay the beast.
It's a curious subject, why are people so inclined to cling to the past? I guess this isn't exactly as case of that, this information can be useful for later reference, but it seems there are a lot more efforts to bring back the past than to think and look toward the future. What's done has been done, and it doesn't matter a whole lot anymore.
It might even help people find prior art for some of the goofey patents we get these days.
D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M.
the ultimate source of yesterday's news
Finally! We'll be able to scan through these ancient texts to find the original source of the hilarious "Just imagine a Beowulf cluster of these" comments, used in every single thread on Slashdot! How I laugh as I read it for the 14 millionth time!
Actually should be interesting material there: Jack the Ripper, John Christie, Mary Ann Cotton etc... Yep, 1800-1900 was a good century for the UK's mass murderers.
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
Before everyone gets carried away with the dupe jokes (as I am the submitter), I think it's important to note the cultural and scientific differences since these articles were originally written. To have a central online repository of this much data will help students to learn. Many students today rely on Google, but google is lacking complete works. Now Google will be able to index another million articles, and that means our knowledge and understanding of that era will increase as time passes. All other benefits are still important, but the student factor is, I think, the greatest part of this.
Now that a complete online library is going online, perhaps other libraries will follow suit, and keep information free?
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
I mean I like pr0n too, but access to the vast libraries of historical documents out there strikes me as what we all thought would be accessible to us back in the days of Tom Swift.
Vote Quimby!
we will now be able to read the journalism of Dickens and Wordsworth all for 2 million
If you have nothing useful to say post as AC.
I hope these stories aren't like the small town papers I used to read growing up in the Appalacian Valley. "Mr. and Mrs. Smith had dinner at old widow Jackson's house Sunday after church meeting. Her leg is healing fine. They sat around and watched Andy Griffith reruns and ate collard greens n' such." ..some of these small towns seem to be stuck in the 19th century. So, I would expect the mentality of the writers and editors of the 19th century to be similar.
For non-UK ./'ers, Page 3 is a page in one of our more popular tabloids, The Sun, that publishes a large picture of a semi-naked lady every day. In fact, Page 3 is the only reason anyone ever buys The Sun.
She's built like a steak house, but she handles like a bistro....
Will all this information help with any prior art stuff?
Millions and Millions of Articles put online that Slashdotters Won't Read!
I submitted this early yesterday, but I guess it got passed over. I'm quite happy Michael posted it, because it's about compelling subject. :-)
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Columbus Discover America!
Andrej
I wonder if they will be putting old Playboy issues online? You know... we only read them for the articles anyway...
Linux with kernel panic...
MadPenguin.org
Excerpt:
"Another likely candidate is the Morning Post, which featured articles by Samuel Coleridge and William Wordsworth."
I guess all these news articles will be at least 50 years old.
This is old news.
...from what I see, this doesn't so much sound like news as background material on life in the 19th century. While I'm very greatful for this information to be made public, why can't we have so much more made public, like supposedly-publicly-accessible government documents? Heck, I'd be happy to get some decent 21st Century News!
--
GNAA
Inventor Eli Whitney Applys For "One-Click" Cotton Gin Patent
Pianists Seek Curbs on Player Piano Technology
"Roll Sharing" Circles Seen as Threat to Recital Revenues
Unsolicited Telegraph Messages on the Rise
So-called "Lard" Telegrams Now Comprise 60% of Traffic, Operators Say
Utah Granted Statehood
Gov. McBride Lays Claim to Concept of Statehood, Says Other States Owe $6.99 Each
(I think The Onion does this better than me.)
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
Ye firste poste.
Because no one will ever RTFAs, even if they are a few centuries old.
> Sorry to burst your bubble but Google doesn't index text in scanned images.
Sorry to burst yours, but I'm guessing they will find a way to index these. It's google, and this is a huge project. What do you want to bet Google indexes them all by hand, or that text versions become available?
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
I have a bound tome of the local newspaper from the year 1905. Certainly, what a difference in culture 99 year ago!
A top political problem in Europe up to that date was women wearing long pantalons in public and irresponsible aviatics flying their fragile machines above the populated cities.(sic!) All socialist parties, which are currently at the peak of power in majority of european countries were totally outlawed, and some their members executed, because of throwing home made bombs on politicians. "War to terror" was that called.
Only things which seems to be almost identical to our time are media advertisings and patent issues.
There you are, staring at me again.
This resource does not appear to me to overlap significantly with Lexis-Nexis or Wikipedia. Theatre reviews and opinion pieces on textile tariffs dating from the 1830s - not to mention the volumes of irredeemable fluff that fill out any newspaper - are not 'information' of the kind you seem to mean. If you just want to find out about ... um ... anything - as everyone does - you aren't going to go looking for it here. The potential of the resource is almost purely academic, I think: it makes researching the culture and daily detail of Victorian London more convenient for eggheads and dilettantes alike.
I want to know more about what the resource will look like. The article is light on details. Are they going to preserve full-page layouts and typography? Will article text be searchable, or just leaders and keywords? What's editorial policy on the boring and lame? The BBC piece leans hard on a few name-drops, but scholarly editions will have already collected most or all of Thackeray's reviews and criticism; Thackeray is less valuable, in this context, than the dreck and bumbasting that can't be found anywhere else.
This is great. Imagine having tons of written history available on the net. It would give those Google guys a challenge.
Maybe there should be a Gutenberg Project for old newspapers and such. Lots of metadata for easy searching.
One of the things that drives me crazy about all the stupid copyright extensions is the amount of recent history that could be digitized. Just imagine the interesting things to be learned from minor accounts from World War II and other events. Right now it's just rotting away on paper and film.
Support the Public Domain Enhancement Act!
This reminds me of a website that Nothwestern has opened that has most of the case files from Chicago homicides from 1870 to 1930.
Take a look.
It's incredible. How did anyone ever survive the city during that time period? If you feel like doing a little sleuthing and completing some unsolved cases, check it out. There's solved cases there as well.
It's a good complement to Devil in the White City by Erik Larsen.
The other amazing this is that almost nothing has changed in over 100 years...
"Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely."
Sorry to burst your bubble but they do. I have no idea how they do it, and tbh the sheer processing power or raw manpaper of scanning scares me.
"The project will cost roughly $3.6 mil USD (converted from UK pounds)"
So about a fiver then...
> (I think The Onion does this better than me.)
:-)
Maybe so, but I still had a good chuckle!
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
They say that those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it, but I think those who learn from history are doomed to repeat it anyway.
"I think we can all agree, the past is over." --Dubya
Seriously, though, the past is interesting because it continues to have effects on the present and the future. Also, because we can learn from patterns that have occurred in the past and from past misakes, so stydy of the past helps us to understand what's going on right now. I think a lot of people who want us to forget the past have very specific things in mind from the past that they'd like us to forget.
My site: Free Nature Pictures
> I gotta ask- why would think this would create "background material for articles?"
My take on it was that with a million articles dating back to the 19th century could back up comments and articles that touch on the early roots of technology or modern science, and perhaps these sources could lead to some interesting comments on the subject matter, or possibly even revelations? Who knows what we'll find? Maybe once the library is used more and more frequently, they will begin adding many more works to it as well.
Whenever someone is talking about famous scientists, any additional info can help, and many many many stories on Slashdot discuss historical features.
I wasn't saying it would be a good source, but that it would help back up statements in stories with additional links to resources. Look at some of the math theories being solved today, for instance; how many of these unsolved mysteries posed in the 19th Century? Many, if I'm not mistaken.
I don't think anyone can be certain how this will exactly affect Slashdot, but I'm guessing that extra info from this era couldn't hurt, right?
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
RTFA? More like RTFLHYOAWN - Read the F*cking Last Hundred Years of Archived Items of Import from the Corresponding Time Periods.
The acronym loving slashdotters will LOVE this development, but then again, IANAALS (I Am Not An Acronym Loving Slashdotter)
Yup...
The past, however, is much brighter. We know what has happened in the past. And the past times were always much better; even the bad times were better, as we managed to survive them, right?
Even more, what happens now was always caused by what happened in the past. The past is where we come from, and that's why we should never forget it. History has shown that when some group loses its touch with the past, it will soon lose itself -- in a sense, we are our past.
And for fuck's sake people, please don't mod this up. Michael is a cock-sucking retard (whose English is even worse than mine) and i would be ashamed if i were modded up in this thread.
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
(shameless plug)
In a similar initiative, the company I work with has republished my country's first newspaper, from the first issue in 1812.
i wonder if any of this will be useful in finding prior art to all the stupid recently issued patents:)
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
Jefe: We have scanned many newspaper stories for your slashdot background material!
El Guapo: How many newspaper stories?
Jefe: Many newspaper stories, many!
El Guapo: Jefe, would you say I have a plethora of newspaper stories?
Jefe: Yes, El Guapo. You have a plethora.
El Guapo: Jefe, what is a plethora?
This is good news for Slashdotters, as this online archival project will provide a plethora of background material for articles and comments
And we all know how much time slashdotters take to thoroughly research background material needed to create an informed and well-thought-out post.
"Hey 3l33td00d, check out this post! ClearChannel just patented short-range FM Radio!"
"Wait a second, hax0rd00d, acording to this Morning Post article I read from the UK 19th century news, there was this guy back in the UK who made an FM radio from a coconut back in 1894!"
"Dude! You're so gonna get mod points on that one!"
"Yea, took three hours to find the thing, but +5 is so worth it!"
See? I told you to just play the guitar.
I've been working on a project similar to this for several years now. http://www.digitalnewspapers.org We have nearly 200,000 pages online and searchable.
The cost is 2,000,000 - for those of us who aren't actually American. Believe it or not michael (just a guess at the editor's name, I didn't look - but let's face it, it'll be him), some people don't come from America. It doesn't cost any dollars, because dollars aren't paying for it. Twat.
funny....
The BBC is funded not by advertising but requires each UK household to pay approx 103(Pounds)/year if they own a TV set (I understand the fee is slightly less if the TV is black and white) /lol
......
..... I do like the BBC and find it funny that our episodes of the Simpsons last 20 minutes and not 30 minutes (no adverts) =P
This worked quite well in the 1980's (when there were only 3 channels) however due to the introduction of cable/satellite boxes we now have access to 50+ channels and still have to pay the BBC it's "rental" fee each year on top of our cable package charges.
Now we have the internet and because the BBC stream radio and other services across the internet there are laws currently being passed that require a TV licence if you have a BROADBAND connection and no TV receiver what so ever.
Make of this what you will
Disclaimer
Paper of Record is a site run by a Canadian company showing off their digitisation software. It's a pay site, but I had a trial membership, and it's pretty cool. Lots of Canadian papers, but American and other foreign ones are plentiful too. All in PDF format, with fairly accurate searching.
Just as illuminating as the news would be what people bought and sold. The advertising would tell us as much, if not more, about the lives of those who read the news as the articles tell us about those who made the news. And if we think that newspapers are better now about reporting than they were 100 to 200 years ago, we may not be learning very much at all about the past.
Lincoln was assassinated? This is the first I've read about this!
I just heard some sad news on wireless - Abraham Lincoln was found dead in a Washington theatre this morning. There weren't any more details yet. I'm sure we'll all miss him, even if you weren't a fan of his work there's no denying his contribution to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
What does RTFLHYOAWN stand for?
Think about it... a man named Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone??? Only a naive fool would buy a coincidence like that...
I have not yet determined the cause for this historical coverup, but I will not rest until I uncover the truth!
"Read Ye F*cking Article"
I love the way the submitter underhandedly insulted the timelyness of slashdot maintainers by saying that this project would result in a lot of good material for the site...
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Google's been 'full' for almost a year guys... u know just when opinion of them peaked they hit ~2**32 and they've NOT gone to 64 bit yet, huge clusters and all... so get over the idea of 'them' having it all ;)
... Articles Worth Noting?
Firste Poste!"
heh - and it couple almost be true.... in that case.
I'd like to see something like this done for old science journals. I've been searching around for a paper by Euler in a Dutch journal, and it seems like hardly anything earlier than 1900 is available electronically. Maybe MathSciNet could start indexing older serials; of course some one would have to host them. I'm sure some universities would pay to subscribe to that kind of service too.
Awesome - now we can read about all the things we are doomed to repeat.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
my Granddad beat up your Granddad... so there...
What I find most interesting when reading old newspaper articles is how much the news hasn't changed. It seems that society continually struggles with the same old arguments, the same old social problems, the same old quick-fix schemes that don't work, the same diversions, the same old same old. I remember thinking to myself that news changes so little (with only the faces and names changing) that after witnessing about a decade of news you have no real need for anymore.
Man discovers fire, claims it will change civilization...
Tribal elders dismiss claims, regard fire only as a passing fad...
Surprised nobody seems to have pointed it out so far, but depending upon the format and licensing, this will potentially be a very useful corpus for researchers working in Natural Language Processing.
I'm not entirely sure that the lack of an online archive of 19th-century newspapers is the primary factor behind some Slashdot articles and comments not containing well-researched background information. But perhaps everyone here wishes they could do extensive historical research before posting, and finally they will be able to do so!
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I was thinking that besides the news archive being useful to historians and curious readers, couldn't a news archive be useful to medical researchers documenting the history of diseases? Mortality rates? Causes of death? Reports of disease and death in poor areas? Seems like this information culled from obituaries might be an alternative/corroborating source to death certificates and medical records, as many folks didn't have access to medical services and who's cause of death wasn't accounted for when they died.
Some conditions might not have been recorded officially, but reported on in the news, as Victorian England was well known for sanitizing the public record. Not a huge source, but another piece of the puzzle?
link doesn't work!
....yes, I know...
I say huzzah and kudos for this preservation of the 19th century! (strokes handlebar mustache). Now I am off to the the barber for the application of leeches; to remove bad humors from the blood. Huzzah!
worst sig ever. . .
We were remodeling an old property I own and discovered that back in the 1930's era they used newspapers stitched together at the sides and covered with wax paper as insulation. When I finished pulling the papers from the wall, I had a good 3 foot stack of Minneapolis Star Tribune papers dating from 1929 through 1931.
I had one heck of a time reading about Al Capone and his rise to power in Chicago... I read a lot of articles about the economy, as the stock market had just crashed in 1929 and everyone was saying how it'll come back and the economy was on an upswing-- little did they know it was the start of the Great Depression.
There were articles that could have been pulled from todays newspapers talking about partisan politics and how the democrats and republicans in congress were fighting over this or that and that some bill had stalled in congress.
It was a fascinating read into history and I can only imagine seeing what all that century's news online would be like - you could just step back into your time machine and read the headlines of the day. That would be fascinating.
Of course, if you want to read about the past and have a laugh, you can always read The Onion where their April 14, 1912 headline announces: "Worlds Greatest Metaphor runs into Iceberg, Sinks".
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
to repeat it...
And if you DO learn from it, you are doomed to see it repeating itself
No sig for the moment.
Well, now, I would argue that. I agree completely that the historical record is massively distorted. Nonetheless, it's good for analyzing general patterns which might help us understand how we got here and what it all means. Furthermore, our knowledge of the present is, if anything, even more tenuous than our knowledge of the past. How do you know what's happening now? Are you everywhere at once. You read about it in the news and watch it on TV. But that's massively distorted too, obviously, and much of what is going on now doesn't become clear until much later, when we have a chance to review secret documents and compare a wide variety of accounts and so forth.
Basically, we have no real way of knowing what's going on, either in the present or in the past. However, trying to reconstruct what we can of the past sheds some light on what we can't accurately reconstruct about the present. One thing history tells us quite clearly is that what is going on is almost never what the general public thinks is going on at the time.
My site: Free Nature Pictures
It would be very interesting to do research on how Britain got news about what happened overseas in its colonies.
For example, was it an "Indian Mutiny" or a "War of Independance" in 1857? (See
Or, was Kitchener of Khartoum a great national hero, or a staunch imperialist chauvinist?
Or, how Thomas Carlyle gradual decline from an iconoclastic liberal to a racist supporting slavery in his essay: "An Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question".
Reading about all this from the time it happened, without the 20/20 hindsight of later research.
Lots of revisionism will ensue. I hope it is of the good kind [factual research challenging entrenched notions], and not the bad kind [pseudoresearch biased by preconceived ideas.
Very interesting indeed.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
I'm the poster and the brittish pound sign is not accepted in Slashdot stories. Mine kept getting deleted. I even tried web ents.
So to get the cost in there, I had to convert.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
I wholeheartedly agree with you.
The problem with those who repeat history's plunders (Dubya being the stark example now), are many, including:
Dubya seems to be doing all that in the most excellent way...
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
What I don't get is why it costs so much. $3.6million just to get started? Surely there are volunteers who have their own $200 scanners that would do this for free? Even gutenberg doesn't have to pay typists to convert books.
It could also be deliberate deception. Noam Chomsky calls this the doctrine of change of course.
The content of the doctrine is: "Yes, in the past we did some wrong things because of innocence or inadvertence. But now that's all over, so let's not waste any more time on this boring, stale stuff."
The doctrine is dishonest and cowardly, but it does have advantages: It protects us from the danger of understanding what is happening before our eyes. --Noam Chomsky
The quote about "the past is over" is interestingly typical of Dubyaspeak. It sounds like nonsense, but if you look at it closely, it's actually the most pernicious form of deception. It would be very convenient for his puppet masters if we were to all forget about all that old boring stuff from history, wouldn't it?
My site: Free Nature Pictures
Oh, no, it's not nearly as cool as that. I've seen that done, it's awesome and beautiful. The doctrine of change of course, on the other hand, is just an old-fashioned, bald-faced lie.
My site: Free Nature Pictures
it is about time! Thank you BBC.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
I wonder if we will have to register just to view
these old news papers? What are they going to use the registration for, improving their reporting?
Lets see, most of the authors are dead, most of the subjects are dead...
Registration should not be necessary, as they will be reading along with us over our shoulder.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Ah, so it's working. Sad to see.
No, you don't. However, have you ever heard the phrase "pattern of behavior" before?
My site: Free Nature Pictures
My main concern is that the format will be under a copyright (e.g., page scans are under copyright).
This makes the content much less useful since you would want to use the content whereever you want without haveing to convert it to text or another format.
But that's just it, you see. The situation is not remotely simple. You've just been told that it is. Look a little deeper. This is part of the pattern of behavior I'm talking about. Imperialist nations often rely on simplistic, black-and-white models of international politics to justify their imperialism. It's standard operating procedure.
If there's a grey area that's debatable, then bring up the point and debate it.
I was just giving what I thought was a rather obvious example of the utility of studying history. If you want to unpack the subject, it is, as I said, rather complex, and we could go on about it for days and not get to the bottom of it. But here's what I see as the central gray area that's debatable: will US corporations profit from the exploitation of Iraq's natural resources? Right now that money is going into a UN-managed fund for the reconstruction of Iraq. Well, guess who has the contract for that job. This is a huge gray area and it's extremely complex, and all the other drama surrounding the issue is used to distract you from paying attention to it.
Watch two things: the disposition of troops, and the flow of money. Everything else is just hype.
My site: Free Nature Pictures