Digital Deconstruction: The Digital Turn and the use of news media as sources for historical research

As cultural historians interested in public debates we necessarily only access historical newspapers through the lenses that they themselves – either as commercial companies, social spaces, and/or cultural phenomena – provide us. In this paper, we propose a digital humanities approach to historical newspapers to overcome these issues of biased information provision. The digital turn has enriched historical research not only with the bottom-up approach of keyword searching, but also with a growing range of digital analysis tools. Applied to (digitized) newspapers, these techniques are able to break down the rhetoric of the journalistic profession and deconstructing illusion and reality. At the same time, the use of digital techniques in historical study faces the researcher with problems and considerations of their own, which this paper addresses in detail.