license: cc-by-sa-4.0
language:
- da
size_categories:
- 1M<n<10M
pretty_name: Enevældens Nyheder Online
ENO – Enevældens Nyheder Online
ENO is a dataset of texts from Danish and Norwegian newspapers during the period of constitutional absolutism in Denmark (1660–1849). In the course of the eighteenth century, newspapers became an everyday medium. They informed a relatively large reading public about everything from high politics to the mundanities of local markets. The dataset was created by re-processing over 550.000 digital images scanned from microfilm and held in the Danish Royal Library's collection. They had initially been OCR-processed, but the results were generally unreadable. ENO re-processed the images using tailored pylaia-models in Transkribus. The OCR-quality is generally high, despite the difficult state of the original images. The newspapers editions have been segmented into individual texts using a model designed by the project team. Such texts are the base entity of the dataset. They include mainly two genres: news items and advertisements.
The dataset is made up of 4.9 million texts amounting to about 474 million words.
Dataset Details
Dataset Description
- Languages: Danish.
Curated by: Johan Heinsen and Camilla Bøgeskov, Historisk Datalaboratorium, Aalborg University. With assistance from Sofus Landor Dam, Anders Birkemose, Kamilla Matthiassen and Louise Karoline Sort.
Funded by: MASSHINE, Aalborg University. Center for Humanities Computing, Aarhus University. Center for Digital Textual Heritage, Aarhus University.
The dataset contains a wide range of newspapers. The total distribution can be studied here. They cover most of Denmark as well as the three oldest newspapers of Norway, running until the separation of the Danish-Norwegian conglomerate in 1814.
Dataset sources
The sources of the dataset can be studied in more detail at the project website. Most of the original image material is available in LOAR – a data repository of the Danish Royal Library. The Norwegian material was downloaded via the API of Nettbiblioteket. The scans of Nyeste Skilderie af Kjøbenhavn were taken from the Internet Archive repository of Niels Jensen. The scans for Politivennen stem from Københavns Biblioteker. Some early newspapers come from recent scans made available to the project by the Danish Royal Library. These are not yet available online.
Notes on licensing
The dataset is licensed under cc-by-sa-4.0. Please note that this license only pertains to the digitised text and dataset curation – not the original images. The original images of all material stemming from The Danish Royal Library, Nettbiblioteket, Københavns Biblioteker as well as the scans of Nyeste Skilderie af Kiøbenhavn made available by Niels Jensen are all in the public domain.
Uses
This dataset represent an effort to enable analysis of Denmark-Norway in the seventeenth, eigtheenth and nineteenth centuries. The data can be used to study and model sentiments, political and cultural currents, and the minutiae of urban life.
In addition, this dataset is also a part of Danish Dynaword, a collection of dataset intended for training language models, thus integrating Danish Cultural Heritage into the next generation of digital technologies.
Dataset structure
Each entry contains
- 'id': A unique id.
- 'text': The full text of a news item.
- 'date': The date of the newspaper edition. Note that the publication Politivennen did not date individual issues. This publication is provided with a dummy date based on the year of publication (e.g. 1798-01-01).
- 'newspaper': The newspaper to which the text belongs, using a standardised name (newspapers frequently changed minor elements of their names throughout the period).
- 'pwa': A predicted word accuracy based on a dictionary consisting of words from literary works, personal names and place names from the census of 1787, and a manually curated list of common words that are present in the material, but not represented in canonical literature. This is an estimate. In general we advise that you filter the dataset on this variable in case of using the material for language modelling. This will also filter out texts in other languages than Danish.
Dataset Creation
Curation Rationale
The newspapers in the dataset generally represent the longest running newspaper series in the Danish and Norwegian libraries. We prioritised long-running newspapers to enable historical analysis of changes over time. As historians this was our initial ambition: to allow us to get quality serial text data. We also prioritised geographical diversity, representing different regions of Denmark-Norway. Of course this varies over time, as newspapers were most common in Copenhagen until the late eighteenth century. Due to the fact that the newspapers of Denmark's Caribbean colonies were mostly in English these are not included. The text recognition model designed for the project struggles with English text. Besides long-running series, we also included a few smaller newspaper series, mainly with an eye towards diversity of subject matters. These include Politivennen which was concerned with very local news from Copenhagen and carried a lot of reader contributions which offer a unique insight into urban sentiments at the time. A similar inclusion was made with Jyllandsposten (of 1838) which was defined by a somewhat radical rural horizon.
As a rule of thumb, publications have been digitised in total – as they exist in their respective collections. This means that they sometimes include appendices and sometimes not, depending on whether these exist. Holes in the dataset mirror holes in the archival collections. The one exception to this rule is the newspaper Københavns Adresseavis. This advertisement paper has survived continuously from its inception in 1759, but from 1804 onwards is only included here with samples of every fifth year. The reason for sampling is a combination of the massive extent of this advertisement paper, and the poor condition of the digital images available for this specific period. Combined this meant that the results of the text recognition process were not entirely satisfying relative to the resources necessary for the effort. Therefore, we decided to prioritize other publications that would yield better quality text.
Most publications contain title page marginalia (date, title etc.). Because these were set with large ornamental types, they are typically recognised with much less accuracy than the regular text. We are currently working on implementing a step in the workflow to identify and filter out these elements.
The coverage of the newspapers included at present can be seen here:
The distribution of texts pr. year is as follows:
Data Collection and Processing.
The text recognition model used to create the dataset is available via Transkribus. A description of the text segmentation process can be found here. Besides segmentation into separate news items / advertisements, no further processing of the text has taken place. We are currently experimenting with automated error correction using decoder-models.
Personal and Sensitive Information
Due to the historical nature of the data, ENO contains no personal or sensitive information.
Bias, Risks, and Limitations
The data reflects the times of its initial creation. This means that it mirrors and describes a deeply hierarchical society that was structured by deep-seated biases and forms of discrimination that are alien even to some of the worst among the living today. For example, the material contains racist language in describing contemporary phenomena such as the Transatlantic slave trade and the persecution of Jewish diasporas. Use cases which might relay or perpetuate such sentiments should be aware of these risks. It is a historical text corpora, warts and all.
Please also note, that while the newspapers are all Danish, they do contain intermittent passages in German and Latin.
Some advertisements were reprinted verbatim. The dataset therefore includes occasional duplicate texts.
More Information
Contact: Johan Heinsen, Aalborg University heinsen@dps.aau.dk