Collections of newspapers in digital form are a rich source of information for researchers in a number of disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Numerous archives, datasets and corpora are available, under a variety of access conditions, and via a number of different interfaces. This workshop will aim to examine ways in which online language technology services can help to search, connect, analyse and visualize the language data in newspaper collections.

One of the objectives is to gain a better understanding of the scenarios in which scholarly communities use newspaper data, and to identify opportunities to optimize the way in which the CLARIN infrastructure supports researchers in using newspapers collections as cultural and social data. The envisaged outcome includes an action plan geared towards enhancing the support of research agendas for newspaper data with a typical CLARIN ‘touch’, such as attention for multilingual issues, the perspective of linking text to data types in other modalities, a research design involving comparison across Europe.

CLARIN-PLUS workshop "Working with Digital Collections of Newspapers" is the second in a series of four, organised as part of the CLARIN-PLUS project in order to demonstrate how the application of language and speech technology tools and services on digital language material can advance humanities and social sciences research in fields other than linguistics. The next editions will focus on the added value of language technologies and the CLARIN infrastructure for (i) the exploration of parliamentary records and (ii) social media data.

This workshop took place in KU Leuven, Belgium from Monday, 19 September, to Wednesday, 21 September, 2016.