At least we finally have joined-up government: they're taking away with one hand, and also taking away with the other.

Although focused on east London, @jimclifford.bsky.social 's great book on the River Lea explores these themes in light of pollution, industrialisation and urbanisation. www.ubcpress.ca/west-ham-and...

Hopefully soon as part of the BL's cyber-recovery. For now you can at least see the content in the form of csv tables on the repo (linked above) which is more useful in some ways, and took a *long* time to create (although it would be great to be able to share the scans too of course!).

This paper was long in the making; many thanks to editors @nolauren.bsky.social, Kristoffer Nielbo and @folgertk.bsky.social as well as @pfyfe.bsky.social @rs4vp.org @ukri.org @theturing.bsky.social and @britishlibrary.bsky.social

Blog: is.gd/2IFc30
Article: doi.org/10.1017/chr....
7/7 end🧵

'Whose News?' shows how new forms of metadata in conjunction with catalogue information can shed light on the complex origins and composition of digital collections, which we argue is an essential prerequisite for meaningful computational research.
6/7

Using enriched metadata e.g., on the price and political affiliation of newspapers, we can determine over-and under-represented voices within the collection; and, for the first time, relate this information to the actual *content* of particular newspaper titles.
5/7

In 'Whose News?' we extend our ‘Environmental Scan’ approach to source criticism at scale using ‘reference metadata’ from the past, which we argue is an approach that could be applied to understanding bias and missingness across other types of documents too.
4/7

We present alongside the paper:
1. ‘NewsWords’ - unigrams from the entire digitised collection, github.com/Living-with-...
2. Newspaper metadata, openhumanitiesdata.metajnl.com/articles/10....
3. Mitchell's Press Directories, bl.iro.bl.uk/concern/data...
3/7

In ‘Whose News?' we analyse @britishlibrary.bsky.social's 19th c. newspaper collections using 3 OPEN ACCESS DATASETS which we also publish to encourage reproducible research with historical British newspaper collections as data... 2/7

Great news, congratulations! Idea for a blog: ‘Journey of a polymath’