Encoding and mapping news. Applying digital humanities methods to research on journalism in the Modern age

Abstract

Digital humanities offer new possibilities to do historical research on journalism in the Modern age. Based on the so-called digital history techniques and methods, we suggest a need to find new, uniform strategies that use the most commonly used standards and protocols in the international scholarly community, so we can construct digitally tagged corpora for future systematic analysis. We review the traditional criteria used to describe newssheets, using the concept of seriality and propose a customized xml/TEI schema to codify this type of texts. We present the preliminary results of the mapping of the news flow networks in the Modern age in Europe. Finally, the conclusions shed some light on the relevance and benefits of applying digital humanities tools to the study of the first European manifestations of what was to become known as "˜journalism´.