Extracting Textual Data from Historical Newspaper Scans and its Challenges for “Guerilla-Projects”

In 2022, it is a common place that digital historical newspapers (DHN) have become increasingly available. Despite the undeniable progress in the supply of DHN and the methods to perform rigorous quantitative analysis, however, working with DHN still poses various pitfalls, especially when scholars use data provided by third parties, such as libraries or commercial providers. Reporting from a current project, we want to share our experiences and communicate the various problems we faced while working with DHN. After a short project summary, we present the main problems that we faced in our project and that we think might also be relevant for other scholars, particularly those who work in small research groups. We arrange these problems according to an archetype workflow, which is divided into the three steps of corpus acquisition, corpus evaluation, and corpus preparation. By raising some red flags, we want to call attention to what we think common DHN related problems, to raise awareness for potential pitfalls, and, this way, to provide some guidelines for scholars who consider using DHN for their research