Join us from Thursday 22 June 2017 to Friday 23 June 2017 in the Europeana Transcribathon Campus Berlin 2017 at the Berlin State Library!

The goal of this two-day challenge is to make documents from the First World War more accessible. We need your help to transcribe and annotate letters, diaries and newspapers from the projects Europeana 1914-1918 and Europeana Newspapers.

The event is made up of two main elements:

• Transcribathon challenge (German/English): Participants will be grouped into cross-generational teams who compete with each other to transcribe historical sources on www.transcribathon.eu. Starting in the afternoon of Thursday 22 June, the teams have 28 hours to transcribe as much text as they can and present their results to an international jury on the following day. Our team members will assist them during the competition.
• Workshops (English): Visitors can take part in transcription and data enrichment workshops on
• Friday 23 June. These include workstations for transcription, annotation, geo-tagging, Linked Open Data and Wikimedia/Wikisource and offer the possibility to discuss with experts.

Throughout the event there will be a number of activities that participants can join, including talks, a panel discussion and a Transcribathon party! Sign-up to this exciting opportunity by 14 June 2017 and join us in the enrichment of fascinating historical sources in an international environment! Register for free via Eventbrite here and find out more about the Campus Berlin event here.

Europeana Transcribathon Campus Berlin 2017 is organised by Europeana, Facts & Files and the Berlin State Library, in cooperation with the German Digital Library and Wikimedia.

For questions please contact team@transcribathon.eu.

At the end of the 19^th century, French society was torn apart by the obscure events around the treason conviction of army Captain Alfred Dreyfus. The question of his guilt was probably the most debated issue in France for nearly 10 years. This discussion not only took place in private conversations, but had also an enormous presence in the press. It is a great example of the newly gained freedom of the press and shows how harsh the competition in the newspaper business must have been already back then. There were several leading newspapers in France, and with only little ad space it was up to the scandalous headlines to accomplish the necessary run. With Europeana Newspapers you can discover the whole variety of the coeval press.

On 15 October 1894 nobody could have presaged that this affaire would go down in history as a symbol of injustice, intrigues and anti-Semitism. Today, 121 years ago, Dreyfus (who had a Jewish background) was arrested for treason in all secrecy. He was accused of communicating French military secrets to the German Embassy and brought to imprisonment on Devil’s Island with a life sentence. As the main piece of evidence was a handwritten letter, the whole country turned into graphologists as Le Martin and Le Figaro published a facsimile of this letter. After five years of custody, the case of Alfred Dreyfus was brought to court-martial again in June 1899 (cf. the catholic-conservative newspaper La Croix). At this time, there could have been no more doubt about Dreyfus’ innocence. Nevertheless, he was sentenced again, this time to ten years in prison under extenuating circumstances. Shortly thereafter, he was pardoned by the President of the Republic, but only after six years he reached the annulment of the judgment of Rennes. The real culprit, Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, was acquitted and innocent Dreyfus was charged guilty twice. The affair did not only cause sensation in France, but was monitored critically all over Europe, for example in the Finnish Uusi Aura, the Dutch Algemeen Handelsblad, or the German Volkszeitung and Neue Hamburger Zeitung.

A lot of French intellectuals were convinced of Dreyfus’ innocence; most prominent amongst them the journalist and novelist Émile Zola. While Zola refused to get involved into political affairs at first, the increasing anti-Semitism in the public debate changed his mind. He published several articles in Le Figaro, amongst others one with the headline Le Syndicat, where he picks up on the imputation a Jewish syndicate tries to buy Dreyfus out of prison, or the article Procès-verbal, expressing his hope that the nation would reconcile and overcome the barbaric anti-Semitic resentments. Shortly after this, Le Figaro terminated the cooperation with Zola because anti-Dreyfusards and right-wing nationalists threatened to call out a boycott on the newspaper. Therefore, Zola published his next article in the newly founded literary journal L’Aurore. J’accuse was an open letter to the president of the French republic, Félix Faure, which caused an enormous scandal and was the decisive factor for the turnaround in the Dreyfus-Affair. Even today, the term “J’accuse” is a synonym for a brave public expression of opinion against the abuse of power. Émile Zola was hereupon sued for libel, as he had already expected at the end of his famous letter.

Despite such famous public advocacy, it was not until July 1906 that Alfred Dreyfus was acquitted and fully rehabilitated in the French society and also in the military service. A general pardon was enacted, that also included the accusation against Émile Zola (see debate in L’Intransigeant).

In the twelve years lasting Dreyfus-Affaire, France was confronted with intrigues, fraud, resignation and overthrow of ministers and the parliament, riots, assassinations, suicides, the attempt of a coup d’état and an alarmingly widespread anti-Semitism. The power of the media grew over the affair in a startling way. Without the contemporary coverage in the newspapers, the Dreyfus case would probably not have become a national affair, nor had intellectuals like Zola publicly taken a position. Therefore, the affair is considered by many to be the birth of the “intellectuals”, a term that was coined during that period through national, right-wing and clerical circles and used derogatory for those journalists, writers, artists and left-wing politicians who fought for Dreyfus. Out of this circle of intellectuals emerged the French Human Rights League in 1898, who in 1922 initiated the first international umbrella organisation of the human rights movement.

The rehabilitation of Dreyfus’ was an example of the long, but in the end successful fight by a democratic and humanitarian-socialist ideals group of intellectuals. The consequences of the affair were a milestone in Europe’s collective memory and sharpened the social and political consciousness.

As a Bavarian princess who enjoyed a happy and unstrained childhood, the extremely strict court life in Vienna was a burden Elisabeth never got used to. She started to travel and wrote melancholic poems, and after the tragic death of her only son Rudolf she disappeared nearly completely from the Austrian court.

When Elisabeth was sixty years old, she followed an invitation from the Rothschild family to Geneva. Together with her lady-in-waiting, the Hungarian Countess Irma Sztáray, she walked the short distance between the hotel and the pier without her entourage, despite warnings of possible assassination attempts.

Luigi Lucheni, a poor man full of rage for the upper nobility, ran towards them as they walked by on the promenade and stabbed Elisabeth directly into her heart with a self-made weapon composed of a small sharp file. But neither the empress nor her lady-in-waiting realised what really happened. Thinking of a robbery attempt, they went on boarding the ship. A few minutes later, Elisabeth lost consciousness and died.

Needless to say, the public, especially in Austria and Hungary, was shocked and in deep mourning.  A lot of newspapers were published with a black mourning border, like Der Burggräfler or Meraner Zeitung. There were long extra issues about the life and death of Empress Elisabeth, for example this broadly illustrated Österreichische Illustrierte Zeitung. Some followed Elisabeth’s passion for poetry and wrote own poems like Die Bombe or Pusterthaler Bote, the Weltblatt just published her last picture (it shows her in her early thirties, she wanted to be remembered young and beautiful, so she refused to sit for any portraits or photographs later on). Less emotional and without huge headlines were the reactions in Prussia, where Berliner Tageblatt newspaper articles focused on the assassin Lucheni and detailed descriptions of the events in the Neue Hamburger Zeitung. The European press also covered the news extensively, just find some examples in French La Croix and Le Martin, La Unión Católica in Spain, the Allgemeen Handelsblad in the Netherlands and  also overseas colonial newspapers reported, like Sumatra-courant.

Elisabeth’s body was brought back to Vienna, where her funeral cortege followed her on 17 September 1898 to the tomb of the Capuchins (get an impression at Österreichische Illustrierte Zeitung). Her assassin Lucheni was caught and confessed immediately. He was brought to Geneva court on 11 November 1898, where he was incarcerated for life, what Luigi regretted a lot, as a death penalty would have had been much more catchpenny. During his process Lucheni declared that he came to the decision to “murder the first high-born person” that he would meet in Geneva (e.g. Hamburger Anzeiger, 12 November 1898), it was just a coincidence that he found out about Elisabeth.

Elisabeth of Austria was one of the first true European citizens, not so much because she was Empress of Austria, Queen of Hungary and Queen consort of Croatia and Bohemia, but because she spent most of her life travelling and deeply loved all the miscellaneous peoples and cultures. She seemed to be a fairy-tale princess, with the undivided love of her husband Emperor Franz-Josef and a paradigm for beauty. Yet this was not the life she was born to live and she tried to break out of her golden cage her whole lifetime.

All things must come to an end eventually – even the Europeana Newspapers project. The good news is that in every end, there is also a new beginning. But more on this later.

After 38 months of hard, but also very fun and rewarding work with our network, the project has officially come to a close in March 2015. But as usual with such endeavours, there are still many activities which go on beyond the lifetime of the project, such as reporting and reviewing, disseminating and spreading the results as well as fostering takeup and new initiatives around the use and exploitation of said outcomes.

And there are many valuable outcomes of the project – more than 20 million historic newspaper pages are now discoverable via Europeana, and close to 12 million pages are fully searchable in The European Library, thanks to the large-scale refinement work undertaken during the project. There are already some great examples of how this vast corpus can be utilised in research, or in the development of new services and applications. Nevertheless, with a collection of this size, the majority of it still needs to be explored and there are certainly many treasures buried within that yet remain to be discovered.

Europeana Newspapers has not only created a massive resource of easily accessible historical news, but also produced several handy tools for the exploitation and enrichement of digital newspapers, together with standards and best practices for collection holders that are aiming to provide their historical newspaper assets in similar ways.

Together, all these resources have really pushed the state-of-the-art of newspaper digitisation and presentation in Europe. And so here it comes: Europeana are already working on an exciting new development – a dedicated Europeana Newspaper channel will be launched in 2016! A new look and feel, more scalable servers, and possibly even more newspaper content are already in the pipeline. Make sure to follow us here and on social media to be amongst the first to hear about this.

Meanwhile, to encourage everyone to dive into all the rich resources delivered by Europeana Newspapers, we have summarised the main project results in a restyled special issue of our Final Report!

Today, the National Library of the Faroe Islands publicly opened the digital archive containing nearly all the faroese newspapers and selected periodica as open access. www.tidarrit.fo

The archive contains 38 titles and roughly 500.000 pages going from 1852 until 1999.

The project has been realized as a part of the digital strategy of the Faroese National Library to digitize and give access to the rich faroese cultural heritage.

Text and images kindly provided by Erling Kjærbo, National Library of the Faroese Islands

Within the Europeana Newspapers project, we often speak of the value of historic newspapers for the academic community but how exactly might a researcher use the material that we’re gathering?

This month we’re interviewing Sophie Kurkdjian, researcher at the IDHES – Institutions et dynamiques historiques de l’économie et de la société of the Université Paris 1 in France.

Can you briefly describe yourself: your background and the research you’ve done using historic newspapers?

I hold a Master degree in contemporary history on the history of journalists in the women’s magazines, based on the study of titles published between 1945 and 2000: mainly Elle and Marie-Claire and daily newspapers such as Le Monde and Le Figaro.

I have also written my Doctoral thesis at the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne on the life of two news publishers at the beginning of the 20^th century – Lucien Vogel and Michel Brunhoff – with researches based on illustrated magazines from the first half of the 20th century, women’s magazines (Gazette du bon ton, Jardin des modes, Vogue français, Vogue), illustrated press (Vu, Regards, BIZ), daily press and weekly literary-political press (Le Petit Journal, Marianne, Messidor).

Your work highlights the importance of newspapers as an information source. How did you discover the link between your research topic and the information recorded by the press?

The press was more than a source of information for me. It was the core topic of both my studies themselves. The link between my research and the press was indeed very important. The central part of my work involved analysing the information in the chosen newspapers in terms of display (layout, title, colours…) and content (history, social policy, and cultural policy).

Was this the first time that you had used newspapers as sources of information for research and did it change the way that you perceive newspapers?

During my research, I faced for the very first time the fact that I was using the press both as a main source of information and as an object of study. While writing my Doctoral thesis I have used newspapers in a more throrough way and it has boosted my interest for this type of material in the context of the new posibilities offered by digitisation, which enhances the richness of such a source of information, not to say the interest to work on it.

How would you compare newspapers to other sources of information such as books and journals?

Newspapers constitue a very rich source of information and first of all allow to work on diverse aspects like format, content, readership, influence on other titles, and reading habits. They offer various entries and can be approached from different points of view (political, economical, or social). One major aspect that can be found in newspapers (and which renders them more interesting and makes them unique in comparison with other sources) is the closeness to the reader’s daily life, to a society at a particular time and place.

They constitute mirrors, seismographs of socio-cultural changes. They reveal social changes such as new consumption and reading habits. They show how readers got used progressivly to reading images: to understand an event through a picture. The study of format changes shows more than any other source of information the evolution of collective representations and mentalities, but also gaps between certain assumptions and the readers “real” practices.

What specific types of information did the newspapers contain that you found valuable?

Social, cultural and political data, the social mood a specific moment (in the readers mail for example) are all valuable information.

In terms of your workflow, did you use digital or paper copies of newspapers and what kind of techniques did you use (e.g. simple keyword search, text mining)?

I used simultinously both digital and print sources. When it comes down to technical aspects, I used the keyword search functionality to access information one would not be able to find in a print version or that would consume much of the time for investigation.

How was your research affected by the format of newspapers that you used, in both a positive and in a negative sense?

To hold in hand a print copy reveals key indications regarding the size, the color of the cover for example, how a format in particular illustrates a change, the importance (or the lack) of advertising in a magazine.

The digital version allows a more general, comparative approach and, as a consequence, to work on a much more precise chronology, to assess with a greater accuracy format changes for instance or the nature of the social debates conveyed by the newspaper, to deconstruct certain ideas through studying more precisely various titles. The negative point lies in the difficulty to set a limit to our field of investigation, to restrain our researches.

If you could choose today between using a digital or a paper archive, which would you choose and why?

I would favor the digital one for practical reasons and the time gain. It allows for a more global vision of a newspaper and even a comparative one. The possibility to select texts and to use the keyword search increases search possibilities.  However, for certain types of newspapers such as illustrated ones, the print version still matters in order to understand the layout, graphism, colours, the rendering, and especially to understand how we entered in the era of the visual society where news had to be shown rather than described.

Looking forward, how would you improve access to historic newspapers? Are there specific tools that need to be provided, or needs that should be met by libraries and digital archives?

Rather than creating new tools, I would prefer specifically targeted improvements. Regarding press magazines for instance, one should take care of not putting all summaries (or all the commercials) for a month/year at the end of the document/volume of the digital copy to be found in Gallica.  Advertisements should be associated with each summary and each issue so that their study can be improved.

What potential do you see for a pan-European archive such as the one being built by Europeana Newspapers? Could you, for example, extend your thesis by having access to newspapers from across Europe via a single website?

The major interest of such a project will be to understand, in a comparative approach, how newspapers from different countries are connected in terms of influence or kinship. For instance, British and German illustrated periodicals influenced not only the French but also the American press at the turn of the 20^th century. Europeana Newspapers is an ambitious project which will appear as a valuable tool for researchers who encounter difficulties while working on foreign newspapers.

Sophie Kurkdjian, many thanks for this insightful interview.

The Europeana Cloud project is seeking researchers who are interested in innovative ways of working and researching with historic newspapers. Those interested can fill out this form and more details are available below.

What can be analysed?

Image credit: Das Interessante Blatt, 18 September 1919. National Library of Austria.

Via the Europeana Newspapers project a corpus of newspapers drawn from the digitised collections of over 20 libraries in Europe has been created. This corpus includes over 10 million pages of OCR’d full text and images, and metadata records relating to several million more issues. Much of the data is in the public domain and available for re-use.

How will we do this?

Work Package 3 of Europeana Cloud contains many developers and human-computer interaction experts. These experts now wish to work with digital humanities or social sciences researchers to build services and tools that exploit this data and help answer research questions that cannot practically be researched without the technology. For example:

• What is the typical sentiment in the reporting of different papers on specific historical events?
• To which locations are historical protagonists tied in the reporting and how does this evolve over time?

How can I take part?

Europeana Cloud has already built similar tools for early modern philosophers and musicologists. If you or your research group is interested in doing the same for historic newspapers, please fill in this short form (10 lines maximum).

See more at: http://pro.europeana.eu/get-involved/projects/project-list/europeana-cloud/europeana-cloud-blog/wanted-historic-newspaper-researchers

First, some historical facts relating to the chain of events that led to women winning voting rights in Finland. In the years before this right was granted, Finland was an autonomous Grand Duchy in the Russian Empire (this lasted from 1809 to 1917). The Diet of Finland was the legislative body in the Grand Duchy of Finland and it met regularly between 1863–1906. Until 1906 there were four estates (the nobility, clergy, the burghers and peasantry) represented. An extra Diet was convened in 1906.

Fact #1. A new Parliament Act and a State Electoral Law was approved on the 29th of May in 1906 to replace the Assembly of the representatives of the estates with a Parliament.

Fact #2.Russian Tsar Nicholas II confirmed on July 20^th 1906 the new electoral law of Finland called “the Parliament Act of the Grand Duchy of Finland”. It guaranteed a universal and equal unrestricted right to vote. Finnish women were the first in Europe to be given the right to vote, and third in the world after New Zealand and South Australia. At the same time, they were first in the world to be granted the right to stand for parliament.

Fact #3. The new Finnish parliamentary system and the electoral law reforms came into effect on the 1st of October 1906 and the first parliamentary elections were held on 15^th and 16^th of March 1907. Nineteen women were elected to a parliament of 200, which was a surprise. They represented various professional groups, including teachers, factory workers, farmers’ wives and high school graduates.

Fact #4. The new members of parliament convened in their first plenary session on 23^rd May 1907.

This article focuses on the historic newspaper Turun Lehti (explore this paper on Europeana and on The European Library), published from 1882–1919. In the early years, it was published twice a week and, from 1884, three times a week. The newspaper was founded to compete with other Finnish language newspapers, called Aura and Sanomia Turusta in the Turku area.

When the structure of the Finnish parliament was revealed, Turun Lehti announced its intention to exercise moderation and impartiality, even though it had a clear admiration of all things Swedish. It was nearly silent on the question of the Finnish and Swedish languages and their official status, whereas the Aura newspaper took a clear stand on the question of language.

Instead of language, Turun Lehti promised to write on financial issues, particularly those related to agriculture. Most of the news was local, but to some extent it also included international news, as well as plenty of literary material and drawing illustrations. The principle of ‘something for everyone’ made it popular among the people. Turun Lehti spread widely over the south-western borders of Finland. Its circulation in 1905 was 10,600 – a considerable amount at that time for a newspaper.

Within the pages of Turun Lehti, we can find articles that relate directly to the chain of historical events presented at the beginning of this article.

The Approval of a new Parliament Act and a State Electoral Law (May 29^th 1906)

Turun Lehti ran two articles on this topic in its issue of 31^st May 1906. Both were published on the front page. The first headline “Uusi waltiopäiwäjärjestys ja waalilaki” (in English The new parliament act and the state electoral law) only dealt with the estates handled by the electoral law reform; women’s right to vote was not specially mentioned. The second headline was “Eduskuntauudistuskysymys waltiopäiwillä” (in English The parliamentary reform in the Diet). This article concerned, for example, the intention to raise the voting age limit from 21 years to 24 years, as well as the other discussions concerning the reform. This was an extra-long multi-column article, which continued in the next issue.

On the 2nd of June 1906, the newspaper continued with its series and published another headline on the frontpage: “Ratkaisun tapahduttua” (in English “The Solution is made”).

The article refers to the news taken from Finland’s largest newspaper Helsingin Sanomat. The article explains the significant historic reform: vote expansion from 200,000–300,000 voters to 1,400,000 entitled voters, when all men and women are allowed to vote.

Russian Tsar Nicholas II confirms the new electoral law of Finland on July 20^th 1906

On the front page of Turun Lehti on the 21st of July 1906 there was a headline “Suomen suuri kysymys lopullisesti ratkaistu” (in English “The big question of Finland is finally resolved”). The article only concerned the new Parliament Act and the electoral law. It did not include any specific mention of women’s suffrage.

The Finnish new parliamentary system and the electoral law reforms came into effect on the 1st of October 1906 

Turun Lehti did not publish any articles of these reforms coming into force. Other newspapers published articles on this topic.

The first parliamentary elections of Finland were held on the 15^th and 16^th of March 1907 

On the 14^th of March 1907, the day before the historic elections, Turun Lehti ran an article highlighting this historic event: where the Finnish people, rich and poor, those of noble and humble birth, had an equally legitimate right to perform the duties of a responsible citizen. It described this “wonderful vote” as the citizens waking up from years of repression, as a result of centuries of slumber.

Turun Lehti published one article after elections on the 19^th of March 1907 with the front page headline “Jälkimietteitä” (in English “After-thoughts”). The article criticized the behaviour of the various parties during the election campaign, but did not mention the women’s right to vote at all.

The new members of parliament, among them 19 women, convened at parliament in their first plenary session on 23^rd May 1907.

On it’s front page, Turun Lehti published the news with the headline “Waltiopäiwät” (in English “The plenary session of the parliament”). In the article, they wrote:

“Yesterday was the anniversary of the most recent Finnish history. For the afore mentioned: date, the 22^nd of May in 1907, convened the new, now under the Parliament Act and existing by universal and equal suffrage, elected parliament for the first time in the plenary session of the parliament in Finland. … For the first time, there are now 200 representatives gathered to concern and resolve important issues for the country and its citizens, who were selected for this important task, when the universal and equal right to vote for the first time in this country – the first in the whole of Europe – was used. … In these elections, women are just as entitled to vote than men, and those women elected as parliament members at first time have now convened to the plenary session of the parliament. Finland is in comparison with the governmental right to vote the leading country in Europe, and that is why the whole Europe wants to check how the parliament, which is elected by universal and equal suffrage, performs its tasks.”

Did the articles report the events as we know them from history books? Surprisingly, there were many minor differences in dates. Some sources mention the official history of the event that it took place a day or days later, even though the newspapers had already reported on the topics.

Do the articles display any political view of the time? The articles clearly mirrored the spirit of the past times on the whole. The women’s movement for equal rights was buried under other major turning points of the society. The question of the voting rights for women did not get as much exposure as it might have in a different phase of history.

Finland was in the years 1906–1907 in the middle of the Russian political “thaw”. Russia had suffered a defeat in the war on Japan and the opposite clout and revolutionary movement forced Nicholas II to make concessions. In these circumstances, the right to vote reform was a surprise to Finland in 1906.

References:

• Centre for Parliamentary Studies. University of Turku.
• Suomen sanomalehdistön historia 7. 1988. Hakuteos Savonlinna – Övermarks Tidning: Sanoma- ja paikallislehdistö 1771–1985. Tommila P. (ed.); Ekman-Salokangas, U., Aalto, E-L, Salokangas, R. Kuopio: Kustannuskiila.
• Wikipedia 1906, 1907 and the history of the right to vote.
• The National Library of Finland. Historical newspaper library.

It was the tenth and final Information day organised by partners of the Europeana Newspapers Project.

The event was attended by a large audience: 88 people in total, among them researchers, librarians, digital content providers, cultural heritage professionals, IT specialists, archivists, audio-visual professionals and teachers.

The speakers at the Information day were equally diverse. Thanks to them, the audience learnt more about many aspects of the project and its possible applications. The day was also an opportunity for those within the project to gather more information on the expectations of researchers with regard to digitised historic newspapers.

The day was made up of three parts.

Round Table #1: Why Europeana Newspapers?

Moderated by Elisabeth Freyre from the BnF, this first round table set the scene for the rest of the day through three presentations, which gave a detailed view of the project, its activities and goals.

The first presentation from Philippe Mezzasalma, Head of the Press department at the Department of Law, Economics and Politics at the BnF, was entitled The digitised newspapers collections at BnF: success and limits of the first historic newspaper digitisation work. It focused on how the BnF became involved in Europeana Newspapers. See the slides.

The second presentation from Hans-Jörg Lieder, Head of the department of bibliographic services at the Berlin State Library, reminded participants of the scale of the Europeana Newspapers project. See the slides.

Ioannis Anagnotopoulos, Coordinating manager of the Europeana Newspapers project at the BnF, set out the contribution of the BnF to the project. See the slides.

He noted that Europeana Newspapers had:

• Enabled the aggregation of historical European newspapers;
• Raised visibility of the Europeana portal and of the portals of partner libraries;
• Brought in a notable improvement of search features, thanks to the semantic enhancement of the data and metadata relating to the selected corpus.

Round Table #2: Technical innovation helping users

The aim of the second part of the morning session, moderated by Jean-Philippe Moreux from the BnF, was to take an in-depth look at the technical innovations of the project.

Günter Mühlberger, Professor and project director at the University of Innsbruck, the university responsible for processing the 8 million pages of the Europeana Newspapers project using OCR presented How can Optical Character Recognition technology help users in their research? See the slides.

Claus Gravenhorst, Director of strategy at CCS (the company which has processed 2 million pages of the project using OLR from 5 partner libraries), then explain the work done by CCS on OLR via his presentation Optical Layout Recognition: From unstructured to structured newspaper data. See the slides.

Clemens Neudecker, Coordinator of the Europeana Newspapers project at the Berlin State Library, then presented Development of Named Entities Recognition for French Newspapers. See the slides.

Alaa Abi Haidar, Researcher in data mining and complex systems at the BnF and the LiP6 laboratory, rounded off this session with a presentation that focused further on the purpose and applications of Named Entity Recognition. See the slides.

Round Table #3: What are the uses, practices, and expectations for the users?

With the afternoon session, the focus was put on the use of the digitised corpus in the project and the expectations of users. The session was moderated by Marc Minon, director of Cairn which is a platform for French-speaking periodicals.

This round table aimed to explore how the digital environment has changed the work methodologies of researchers, and to show what role Europeana Newspapers can play in this changing environment through the experience of the following speakers:

• Laurent Martin, Professor and lecturer at institutions such as the University of Paris III Sorbonne-Nouvelle, researcher at the Integration and Cooperation laboratory for European environments (ICEE) and member of the History Committee of the Ministry of Culture;
• Philippe Tétart, Senior lecturer in History (University of Maine), researcher and expert consultant to the National Sports Museum;
• Sophie Kurkdjian, Doctor of History at the University of Paris I, researcher working with the BnF and associate researcher with the IHTP-CNRS;
• Olivier Hamon, engineer and specialist in web semantics, working in the research and development unit of the company Syllabs.

All attendees received promotional materials, including a leaflet about the project and a promotional postcard printed with a French newspaper. Both were provided in French.

Overall, the day was rated a success by those who attended. A survey circulated after the event showed that over 90% of participants rated the presentations as Good or Very Good, and said they intended to explore the content made available by the project.

The event was mainly aimed at a French speaking audience and a translation service from English to French was available. The whole event was also recorded on video and will shortly be made available on the BnF website.

A few weeks later, the Spartacist uprising led to the end of the November Revolution in Germany. The uprising was terminated on 15 January 1919 with the assassinations of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg by German militaries.

The huge headline of Berliner Tageblatt on 16 January 1919 announces the killing of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht after they had been arrested. The article reports that Liebknecht had been shot while trying to escape and that Luxemburg had been beaten up by an angry crowd before she was also shot in a car. We now know that Rosa Luxemburg was knocked down by a soldier, pulled unconscious into the car, shot, and her body was thrown into a river by German military. The car was later hijacked by unknowns. When it was found the next day, it did not contain Luxemburg’s body. What the article does not speak about is that Liebknecht was also forced out of his car so he could be shot in the back.

The Berliner Tageblatt was a twice-daily Berlin newspaper founded in 1872. It evolved from an advertising paper into one of the two most influential newspapers in the German capital. The newspaper, which also had considerable influence abroad, was a social-liberal paper with a top run of 300,000 copies per issue. It was known for high quality journalism, not connected to a political party and thus was seen as open-minded. The target audience was intellectual and well educated. In the 1920s, famous authors like Kurt Tucholsky, Erich Kästner and Alfred Kerr regularly wrote for the paper.

Chief editor Theodor Wolff is still regarded as a highly liberal, independent and well-considered journalist in Germany. Wolff had to flee the country after his severe criticism of the Reichstag fire in 1933. Shortly afterwards, the newspaper was forced into Gleichschaltung by the Nazi regime and the publication was finally given up in 1939.

The article about the death of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg was published the day after the incident occurred, taking up the whole front page and also parts of the second page. This shows that the event was of great interest to the public.

The main article is written in a rather neutral tone, though it contains false information that was probably spread to many journalists. For example, it states that the soldiers tried to protect the prisoners by all means, while in fact the soldiers murdered the prisoners. The truth about the assassinations of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg was not revealed until several decades later.

A comment about the life and impact of the two politicians paints a clear picture: Liebknecht was seen as a lunatic without any political instinct. Luxemburg on the other hand was described as a very intelligent and charismatic woman, who made some bad decisions but who acted for the right reasons. Her assumed lynching by the crowd is condemned harshly by the newspaper.

Even though the article follows the false information that was spread at the time, the Berliner Tageblatt was in general an open-minded newspaper aiming to provide a considerate political view without being influenced by the authorities. In this spirit also fits the probably most famous quote from Rosa Luxemburg: “Freedom is always the freedom of the one who is thinking differently”.

Thanks to Sandra Kobel of the Statsbibliothek zu Berlin for writing this article.