This event is co-hosted by BPL Digital Services.
Historical newspapers hold stories that shaped our communities, but the sheer volume of their pages has long limited what we could discover within them. What changes when we can digitize and then analyze millions of pages at once?
This event, co-hosted by BPL Digital Services and the Leventhal Map & Education Center, explores how computational text analysis is transforming historical newspaper research. From newspaper collecting that began in the wake of the American Revolution to training datasets to reveal large-scale patterns, they'll examine what becomes possible when computational methods meet cultural heritage — and what responsibilities come with these new capabilities.
Join Molly Hardy from Library Innovation Lab and Greg Leppert, Executive Director of Harvard's Institutional Data Initiative, as they examine the formation of historical newspaper collections and how artificial intelligence contributes to efforts to digitize and make accessible these collections.
Dr. Molly Hardy currently serves as the Project Lead for the Public Data Project at Harvard Law School’s Library Innovation Lab. She began her work in special collections at the Harry Ransom Center, while completing her dissertation on eighteenth-century copyright law. Her writing, which has been both public facing and scholarly, has appeared in professional blogs, exhibition catalogs, newspaper articles, and academic journals, and has centered on the transfer of early American archives into online environments, as well as the digital aggregation of historical newspapers and large sets of public data. Her most recent article, “The Unfree Press in the Revolutionary Age, or How to Read an Eighteenth-Century Newspaper,” is forthcoming in the Cambridge History of the American Revolution.
Greg Leppert is the Executive Director of the Institutional Data Initiative at Harvard Law School Library, a research initiative that works with libraries, universities, and government agencies to publish their collections as high-quality datasets. He is also the Chief Technologist of the Berkman Klein Center. Previously, Greg built startups in NYC and Austin TX, toured in art-rock bands, and worked in a historic letterpress studio. He is a strong believer that most people want to do good in the world and are simply looking for the right way to go.
