Interdisciplinary collaboration in studying newspaper materiality

This paper presents a collaboration between computer scientists, linguists and historians studying the material aspects of newspapers and developing a tool for that purpose. The paper describes how the back-and-forth collaboration in terms of research questions and technical challenges yielded insights both for solving computational problems as well as refining historical analysis. In the project, existing metadata was amended by reconstructing new materiality data from the Finnish digitised newspaper corpora. The analysis of such data is crucial for studying the development of newspapers, but can also inform other computational studies on the same data. The use of enriched materiality data allows for better understanding subdivisions in large corpora such as digitised newspapers, but also highlight that content and form interact. Content analysis of newspapers should therefore always take into account material properties of the studied material to properly grasp the cultural, social and political meanings embedded in the sources.