The Danish Borderland - Mining political opinions in 19th century newspapers
For the fifth year in a row The Royal Danish Library is organizing a Datasprint. The Datasprints in the library are informal learning experiences where participants experiment with digital cultural heritage collections and digital methods for analysis and dissemination.
This year, we invite students and staff from Danish universities to join staff from Royal Danish Library to look into the historical Danish newspapers between 1830 – 1870 and examine the kind of language writers have used to express a political opinion that might be qualified as belonging to certain political currents.
We will try to figure out how do specific phrases, tropes and rhetorical modes, for instance, reflect and create historical and social changes? When do specific ideas and concepts, as expressed in printed words of daily journalism, appear, evolve, and remain or disappear from the historical horizon?
There is no better source to depict and bring back the arena of public political, intellectual and polemical discourse than newspapers, and we got loads of them, to put it plainly! But we also have digital methods and tools, necessary and highly applicable, when it comes to this kind of task.
These two – the extensive newspapers’ collection and smart digital methods – in unison make this year’s Datasprint highly interesting and recommendable.