Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung as a Searchable Online Corpus

Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 969–976 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c⃝ European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC 969 Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung as a Searchable Online Corpus Bernd Kampe1 Tinghui Duan1,2 Udo Hahn1 1 Jena University Language & Information Engineering Lab (JULIE) Lab 2 Graduate School “Romanticism as a Model” Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Jena, Germany {bernd.kampe | tinghui.duan | udo.hahn}@uni-jena.de Abstract The massive digitization efforts related to historical newspapers over the past decades have focused on mass media sources and ordinary people as their primary recipients. Much less attention has been paid to newspapers published for a more specialized audience, e.g., those aiming at scholarly or cultural exchange within intellectual communities much narrower in scope, such as newspapers devoted to music criticism, arts or philosophy. Only some few of these specialized newspapers have been digitized up until now, but they are usually not well curated in terms of digitization quality, data formatting, completeness, redundancy (de-duplication), supply of metadata, and, hence, searchability. This paper describes our approach to eliminate these drawbacks for a major German-language newspaper resource of the Romantic Age, the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung (General Music Gazette). We here focus on a workflow that copes with a posteriori digitization problems, inconsistent OCRing and index building for searchability. In addition, we provide a user-friendly graphic interface to empower content-centric access to this (and other) digital resource(s) adopting open-source software for the purpose of Web presentation. Keywords: Digital Humanities, historical newspapers, corpus compilation, romanticism research, data integration 1. Introduction The on-going large-scale digitization of historical news- papers lays the infrastructure foundations for profoundly changing information management workflows in the hu- manities (Trace and Karadkar, 2017; Blanke and Hedges, 2013) and, in the end, allows humanities scholars to explore entirely new research avenues. For example, the Oceanic Exchanges project1 analyzes historical newspapers from 1840 through 1914 to examine patterns of information flow across national and language borders (Oiva et al., 2019). The Living with Machines project2 focuses on newspapers published in the United Kingdom during the Long Nine- teenth Century (c.1780–1918) and examines the ways in which technology altered people’s work and life. In sev- eral case studies of the NewsEye project,3 topics such as migration, gender and nationalism are investigated based on digitized historical newspapers from 1850 through 1950 provided by the national libraries of Austria, Finland and France. A case study of the impresso project4 on the anti- European movements explores how to make newspapers a valuable source for examining public opinion in the 19th and 20th century. Whilst all of the above-mentioned projects concentrate on general newspapers aimed at ordinary people as primary recipients, newspapers targeting narrower defined intellec- tual circles still suffer from a pronounced lack of attention in digitization campaigns. Hence, researchers in such fields miss the advantages resulting from digital access, search and automated analysis tools (cf., e.g., the frameworks pro- vided by Niekler et al. (2018), Frank and Ivanovic (2018), Pustejovsky et al. (2017), Brooke et al. (2015), …

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