The application of digital technologies to historical newspapers have changed the research
landscape historians were used to. An Eldorado? Despite undeniable advantages the new digital
affordance of historical newspapers also transforms research practices and confronts historians
with new challenges. Drawing on a growing community of practices the impresso project invited
scholars experienced with digitised newspaper collections with the aim of encouraging a
discussion on heuristics source criticism and interpretation of digitized newspapers. This
volume provides a snapshot of current research on the subject and offers three perspectives:
how digitisation is transforming access to and exploration of historical newspaper collections
how automatic content processing allows for the creation of new layers of information and
finally what analyses this enhanced material opens up. 'impresso - Media Monitoring of the
Past' is an interdisciplinary research project that applies text mining tools to digitised
historical newspapers and integrates the resulting data into historical research workflows by
means of a newly developed user interface. The question of how best to adapt text mining tools
and their use by humanities researchers is at the heart of the impresso enterprise.
