Search historic newspaper photos using Newspaper Navigator | Hacker News Reader

Search historic newspaper photos using Newspaper Navigator

news-navigator.labs.loc.gov

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A little browsing gives some really interesting details:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn99063812/1918-10-2...

The Evening Herald., October 23, 1918, Image 1

"NO ARMISITICE 'TILL HUNS GO HOME"

Here an explanation for "Huns":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terms_used_for_Germans...

At the same page:

"INFLUENZA IS SPREADING IN MOST STATES"

"GET A MASK LIKE THIS"

"Get your mask right away and wear it continuously. It may be the means, not only of saving you from an attack of the Influenza or some other dreaded contagious disease but may also save some of those with whom you may come in contact."

More than 100 years ago.

Really well-made and easy to use (I'd just change the interface font to proportional). OCR text seems to be without errors beyond the occasional "hyphe- nation." Photos are downloadable in high quality, and they also link to full browseable issues. The dataset cuts off in 1963 though, hopefully it'll expand as more material becomes available in the public domain.

Edit: found some examples of bad OCR too. For example, half of the few results for "Taiwan" are misspellings of another word (the words are actually "Fagan," "Edward," and "Japan").

Did anyone else's brain read "Newspaper" as "Netscape"?

Wow. No sarcasm here. Until you pointed it out, I was wondering why they named it that way. I suspect only a certain percentage of us are so affected.

I feel bad for you being downvoted for this — it's a total generational marker. Probably 100% overlap with anyone who also remembers what a 56k modem squeal sounds like.

Glad to see a public resource in this space, often I get directed to subscription-only databases when I'm looking for a historical newspaper.

Is the underlying text collection available for bulk download or api query?

See https://news-navigator.labs.loc.gov/ for more information.

The underlying collection is also public if you wanted to do a different kind of processing:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/data/

s3://ndnp-batches

Also note that if you want image slices the entire collection has a IIIF image server used by the main Chronicling America site and this search application.

Wow very cool. It was the text I was interested in and I can see that it's tokenized in the XML, that's great.

If you find anything cool to do with it, let https://twitter.com/LC_Labs know.

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