The Case Studies are led by the Digital Humanities Groups who work with the corpora of our three national libraries (Austria, Finland, France) testing existing tools and later those developed by our Computer Science groups. The idea is to delve into some of the current research issues, questions and topics of relevance to our project and other lay (and/or digital) historians, researchers, librarians, students amongst others.
With the beginning of industrialisation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, intercontinental and internal European migration patterns changed dramatically. The nineteenth century was often even called the ‘age of migration' or the century of the ‘great drift'. For the first time, we can see a migration industry that specialised in the organisation and processing of mass migration. While the rise in awareness and the subsequent increase in migration studies in all humanities fields has led to important scholarship also in regard to the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the discourses still offer a wide variety of research opportunities using newspapers in a comparative approach. The subtopics chosen for the case study on migration are ‘Return migration', ‘The business of emigration' and ‘Negotiating asylum, aid and accommodation', as these topics all offer various opportunities and challenges.
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Gender was an important theme across Europe during the period studied by NewsEye (1850-1940). In many ways, newspapers strengthen and spread discriminations and sexual prejudices experienced by women but at the same time, the press plays an important role in the progressive transgression of certain barriers. Some women managed to introduce literary and journalistic circles while others used newspapers to fight for the right to vote or to dress as they want. Nevertheless, in-depth research on the French press within these subtopics is surprisingly uncharted and therefore needed. In this sense, the subtopics ‘women's suffrage’, ‘women writers’ and ‘women and pants’ will be further investigated. These subtopics bring to light the marginalization of women in newspapers and gender inequalities while revealing the means implemented by women to struggle against them.
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Nation building is a widely studied topic in history, sociology and political studies. Most studies on nations and nationalism focus on the period from the eighteenth century to today as a time of formation for modern nation-states by using canonic texts or describing changes in social and economic conditions. The topic of nation building can be approached anew with large-scale digitized newspapers that developed in conjunction with the process of nation building. This case study uses newspapers as a text dataset to statistically describe how the language relating to nationhood changed and how newspapers themselves contributed to shaping national discourses with ethnic, class-based and gendered tensions. We use methods from natural language processing to describe how terms like nation, national, nationalism (and other -isms) changed in meaning over time. Further, we also focus on selected cases of newspapers writing about sudden ruptures in political history, such as the reporting on the largest civil disaster in Austria during WWI.
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The Schulerstrasse in Vienna's first district, popularly known as Zeitungsgasse, was the street with the highest media presence in Vienna at the end of the 19th century and thus the Habsburg monarchy. The legislation of 1862/1863 led to a post neo-absolutistic era and therefore a legal basis for the press. It provided stabilization for an emerging industry, which had to face censorship and massive restrictions. On the basis of emerging infrastructures and media - for example the rotary press, the typesetting machines, the telegraph and the telephone - editorial offices and its professions arose. This case study takes a particular look at the emerging profession of the journalist, the concrete practices as well as the effects of their work and their sphere of influence.
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