An App to offer historians and migration scholars new perspectives on the geographies of the past
Thanks to the Research Fund for Innovation in IT, we build the GeoNewsMiner (GNM), an interactive tool that maps and visualises geographical references in historical newspapers. This allowed us to present and analyse the results in an intuitive, interactive, and reproducible way. If you want to deploy your own GNM App, you can find the step-by-step documentation here.
The App is completely Open Access. Users can also share their results, download the raw data reflecting their filters’ selection, and download the visualised map as a .png file
The immigrant press as the data source
GNM is based on ChroniclItaly (Viola 2018), a corpus of Italian language newspapers published in the United States between 1898 and 1920. Using a digital heritage collection such as immigrant newspapers allowed us to research how the Transatlantic migration experience was narrated in the newspapers.
Building up on the GNM
The GNM is really just the tip of the iceberg. I am currently the PI on a new research project at C²DH to build new functionalities on the App. Check my Blog post on the Thinkering Grant!
