---
annotations_creators:
- no-annotation
language:
- en
language_creators:
- machine-generated
license:
- cc0-1.0
multilinguality:
- monolingual
pretty_name: Dataset Card for ERWT Hertiage Made Digital Newspapers training data
size_categories:
- 100K<n<1M
source_datasets: []
tags:
- library,lam,newspapers,1800-1900
task_categories:
- fill-mask
task_ids:
- masked-language-modeling
---

# Dataset Card for ERWT Hertiage Made Digital Newspapers training data

## Table of Contents
- [Table of Contents](#table-of-contents)
- [Dataset Description](#dataset-description)
  - [Dataset Summary](#dataset-summary)
  - [Supported Tasks and Leaderboards](#supported-tasks-and-leaderboards)
  - [Languages](#languages)
- [Dataset Structure](#dataset-structure)
  - [Data Instances](#data-instances)
  - [Data Fields](#data-fields)
  - [Data Splits](#data-splits)
- [Dataset Creation](#dataset-creation)
  - [Curation Rationale](#curation-rationale)
  - [Source Data](#source-data)
  - [Annotations](#annotations)
  - [Personal and Sensitive Information](#personal-and-sensitive-information)
- [Considerations for Using the Data](#considerations-for-using-the-data)
  - [Social Impact of Dataset](#social-impact-of-dataset)
  - [Discussion of Biases](#discussion-of-biases)
  - [Other Known Limitations](#other-known-limitations)
- [Additional Information](#additional-information)
  - [Dataset Curators](#dataset-curators)
  - [Licensing Information](#licensing-information)
  - [Citation Information](#citation-information)
  - [Contributions](#contributions)

## Dataset Description

- **Homepage:**
- **Repository:**
- **Paper:**
- **Leaderboard:**
- **Point of Contact:**

### Dataset Summary

This dataset contains text extracted at the page level from historic digitised newspapers from the [Heritage Made Digital](https://bl.iro.bl.uk/collections/9a6a4cdd-2bfe-47bb-8c14-c0a5d100501f?locale=en) newspaper digitisation program. The newspapers in the dataset were published between 1800 and 1870.

The data was primarily created as a dataset for training 'time-aware' language models.

The dataset contains text generated from Optical Character Recognition software on digitised newspaper pages. This dataset includes the plain text from the OCR alongside some minimal metadata associated with the newspaper from which the text is derived and OCR confidence score information generated from the OCR software. 

#### Breakdown of word counts over time 

Whilst the dataset covers a time period between 1800 and 1870, the number of words in the dataset is not distributed evenly across time in this dataset. The figures below give a sense of the breakdown over time in terms of the number of words which appear in the dataset. 

|   year |   total word_count |   unique words |
|-------:|-------------------:|---------------:|
|   1800 |        282,554,255 |     15,506,515 |
|   1810 |        328,817,174 |     18,295,974 |
|   1820 |        328,817,174 |     18,295,974 |
|   1830 |        194,958,624 |     10,816,938 |
|   1840 |        305,545,086 |     17,018,560 |
|   1850 |        376,194,785 |     20,942,876 |
|   1860 |        305,545,086 |     17,018,560 |
|   1870 |         51,241,037 |      2,284,803 |

![Total and unique word count over time](readme_figs/total_unique_word_count.png)


### Supported Tasks and Leaderboards


[More Information Needed]

### Languages

[More Information Needed]

## Dataset Structure

### Data Instances

[More Information Needed]

### Data Fields

[More Information Needed]

### Data Splits

[More Information Needed]

## Dataset Creation

### Curation Rationale

[More Information Needed]

### Source Data

#### Initial Data Collection and Normalization

[More Information Needed]

#### Who are the source language producers?

[More Information Needed]

### Annotations

#### Annotation process

[More Information Needed]

#### Who are the annotators?

[More Information Needed]

### Personal and Sensitive Information

[More Information Needed]

## Considerations for Using the Data

### Social Impact of Dataset

[More Information Needed]

### Discussion of Biases


![](https://huggingface.co/datasets/davanstrien/hmd-erwt-training/resolve/main/readme_figs/mean_ocr_wc_over_time.png)

[More Information Needed]

### Other Known Limitations

[More Information Needed]

## Additional Information

### Dataset Curators

[More Information Needed]

### Licensing Information

[More Information Needed]

### Citation Information

[More Information Needed]

### Contributions

Thanks to [@github-username](https://github.com/<github-username>) for adding this dataset.