Aspect-Driven Structuring of Historical Dutch Newspaper Archives

TL;DR

This paper presents a role-based interface for structuring Dutch newspaper archives around historical figures, enhancing access despite data and licensing challenges, validated through expert evaluations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel role-based system for organizing historical news articles by persons, addressing practical limitations in digital library curation.

Findings

Prototype effectively structures articles around historical figures.

Expert interviews confirm system's usefulness for digital libraries.

Component-wise evaluations demonstrate system's accuracy.

Abstract

Digital libraries oftentimes provide access to historical newspaper archives via keyword-based search. Historical figures and their roles are particularly interesting cognitive access points in historical research. Structuring and clustering news articles would allow more sophisticated access for users to explore such information. However, real-world limitations such as the lack of training data, licensing restrictions and non-English text with OCR errors make the composition of such a system difficult and cost-intensive in practice. In this work we tackle these issues with the showcase of the National Library of the Netherlands by introducing a role-based interface that structures news articles on historical persons. In-depth, component-wise evaluations and interviews with domain experts highlighted our prototype's effectiveness and appropriateness for a real-world digital library collection.