Digitised History: the impact of digitisation on research into 18th and 19th Century Britain20 July 2010

Event overview

For decades, even hundreds of years after publication, researchers of all kinds have turned to newspapers for information relating to a wide variety of research needs including historical, cultural, social and political trends. The British Library Newspapers Online website, part of the JISC Digitisation Programme, aims to make this information available to researchers, who can now explore over three million pages of 18th and 19th century newspapers online.

This conference aims to explore the impact of the large scale digitisation of newspapers, considering the effect that this has had on research and researchers and the implied changes to research methodologies. Not only has the digitisation of historical newspapers made it easier to discover information about events from the past, but the way in which they have been digitised makes it possible to discover how those events were represented, debated and sold as news. It will debate current limitations as well as opportunities for future development.

The conference is being organised jointly by the British Library and JISC and will include a keynote talk, presentations and panel discussions with academics and other researchers. Full programme details will be released shortly.

Confirmed speakers include: Laurel Brake, Aly Conteh, Jim Draper, Alistair Dunning, Tim Hitchcock, Jim Mussell, Simon Potter, Miles Taylor and Bob Shoemaker. They will be talking about such diverse subjects as 'Rogues, ruffians and villains: researching crime in newspapers and other digitised sources', 'Victorian newspapers, then and now' and 'Researching transnational history using digital newspapers: the case of the British Empire'.