Oceanic Exchanges Ontologies

As part of Oceanic Exchanges, Dr Beals and Dr Bell led a two-year, six-nation project exploring the histories, structures and future of digitised newspaper collections around the world.

Over the past 30 years, millions of pages of historical newspapers have been digitised, creating a valuable resource for people worldwide. However, these nation-based programmes cannot offer a complete representation of their cultural history as they often mask the fact that a globalised news system emerged more than 200 years ago.

The team of nearly 40 international researchers pooled their wealth of knowledge, linguistic range, and long-standing relationships with local heritage sectors to address this issue.

Their work explains how to digitally rebuild the nineteenth-century global news network to better reflect its international and multicultural nature. More significantly, it maps collections, guiding the linking of independent databases in a holistic, system-driven manner.

Subsequent funding has supported wider dissemination, helping to improve the choice and availability of historical newspapers worldwide.

The project’s key outcome, The Atlas of Digitised Newspapers and Metadata – a unique Open Access guide to newspaper databases around the world – demonstrates the potential of international, multidisciplinary work in the humanities.

With readers in more than 60 countries, it is already becoming a recommended reference for potential users of online collections and is supported by ongoing workshops and webinars in the project’s partner countries.