metadata

annotations_creators:
  - no-annotation
language:
  - de
  - fr
  - lb
  - nl
  - la
  - en
language_creators:
  - expert-generated
license:
  - cc0-1.0
multilinguality:
  - multilingual
pretty_name: BnL Newspapers 1841-1879
size_categories:
  - 100K<n<1M
source_datasets:
  - original
tags:
  - newspapers
  - 1800-1900
  - lam
task_categories:
  - text-generation
  - fill-mask
task_ids:
  - language-modeling
  - masked-language-modeling

Dataset Card for BnL Newspapers 1841-1879

Dataset Card for bnl_newspapers1841-1879

Dataset Description

Homepage: https://data.bnl.lu
Repository:
Paper:
Leaderboard:
Point of Contact: opendata at bnl.etat.lu

Dataset Summary

630.709 articles from historical newspapers (1841-1879) along with metadata and the full text.

21 newspaper titles 24.415 newspaper issues 99.957 scanned pages Transcribed using a variety of OCR engines and corrected using https://github.com/natliblux/nautilusocr (95% threshold) Public Domain, CC0 (See copyright notice)

The newspapers used are:

Der Arbeiter (1878)
L'Arlequin (1848-1848)
L'Avenir (1868-1871)
Courrier du Grand-Duché de Luxembourg (1844-1868)
Cäcilia (1863-1871)
Diekircher Wochenblatt (1841-1848)
Le Gratis luxembourgeois (1857-1858)
L'Indépendance luxembourgeoise (1871-1879)
Kirchlicher Anzeiger für die Diözese Luxemburg (1871-1879)
La Gazette du Grand-Duché de Luxembourg (1878)
Luxemburger Anzeiger (1856)
Luxemburger Bauernzeitung (1857)
Luxemburger Volks-Freund (1869-1876)
Luxemburger Wort (1848-1879)
Luxemburger Zeitung (1844-1845)
Luxemburger Zeitung = Journal de Luxembourg (1858-1859)
L'Union (1860-1871)
Das Vaterland (1869-1870)
Der Volksfreund (1848-1849)
Der Wächter an der Sauer (1849-1869)
D'Wäschfra (1868-1879)

Supported Tasks and Leaderboards

Languages

German, French, Luxembourgish

Dataset Structure

JSONL file zipped.

Data Instances

Data Fields

identifier : unique and persistent identifier using ARK for the Article.
date : publishing date of the document e.g "1848-12-15".
metsType : set to "newspaper".
newpaperTitle : title of the newspaper. It is transcribed as in the masthead of the individual issue and can thus change.
paperID : local identifier for the newspaper title. It remains the same, even for short-term title changes.
publisher : publisher of the document e.g. "Verl. der St-Paulus-Druckerei".
title : main title of the article, section, advertisement, etc.
text : full text of the entire article, section, advertisement etc. It includes any titles and subtitles as well. The content does not contain layout information, such as headings, paragraphs or lines.
creator : author of the article, section, advertisement etc. Most articles do not have an associated author.
type : type of the exported data e.g. ARTICLE, SECTION, ADVERTISEMENT, ...

Dataset Creation

The dataset was created by the National library of Luxembourg with the output of its newspaper digitisation program.

Curation Rationale

The selection of newspapers represent the current state of digitisation of the Luxembourg legal deposit collection of newspapers that are in the public domain. That means all newspapers printed in Luxembourg before and including 1879.

Source Data

Printed historical newspapers.

Initial Data Collection and Normalization

The data was created through digitisation. The full digitisation specifications are available at https://data.bnl.lu/data/historical-newspapers/

Annotations

Annotation process

During the digitisation process, newspaper pages were semi-automatically zoned into articles. This was done by external suppliers to the library according to the digitisation specifications.

Who are the annotators?

Staff at the external suppliers.

Personal and Sensitive Information

The dataset contains only data that was published in a newspaper. Since it contains only articles before 1879, no living person is expected to be included.

Considerations for Using the Data

Social Impact of Dataset

Discussion of Biases

The biases in the text represent the biases from newspaper editors and journalists at the time of the publication. In particular during the period from 1940/05/10 to 1944/09/10 the Nazi occupier controlled all information published.

Other Known Limitations

The OCR transcription is not perfect. It is estimated that the quality is 95% or better.

Additional Information

size of dataset

500MB-2GB

Dataset Curators

This dataset is curated by the national library of Luxembourg (opendata at bnl.etat.lu).

Licensing Information

Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication and Certification

Citation Information

@misc{bnl_newspapers,
title={Historical Newspapers},
url={https://data.bnl.lu/data/historical-newspapers/},
author={ Bibliothèque nationale du Luxembourg},

Contributions

Thanks to @ymaurer for adding this dataset.

Datasets:

biglam
/

bnl_newspapers1841-1879