Newspaper Digitizations: Friendly Applications

Silvia Valisa

An online digitized and searchable version of the nineteenth-century Italian newspaper, Il secolo.

Overview

Context

The digital project Il secolo aims at making available online a digitized and searchable version of this newspaper (1866-1927). It has developed under my direction, but mainly thanks to the managing and technical skills of the Office of Digital Research and Scholarship (persons of reference were Micah Vandegrift until 2018, and Sarah Stanley after that, as DH Librarians, together with Krystal Hall as Digital Archivist). Started in 2013, the project published a first set (17 years) in December 2018, and we are currently working on uploading the next batch of years (to the newspaper’s closing, in 1927) but also an improved, more OCR-friendly version of the images for the first 17 years. We are also exploring which added features could make this material more “exploitable” and more searchable by the public.

Developing in parallel with this project is a print monograph on Italian publisher Sonzogno (1804–forward). Ever since its beginnings as a bookseller in early 19th century, the Sonzogno family operated at the intersection of tradition and modernity and contributed to defining the emerging role of the “editore” (“publisher” but also “editor”). With the Italian unification and the market expansion that followed, Sonzogno combined in its business model the three branches of knowledge of the time–newspapers, books, and musical material–offering a template for the culture industry overall. Even after the change in ownership in the first half of the 20th century, the firm continued to conceive of its place in the production of culture in Italy in terms of diversity, intermediality, and accessibility. Yet, whereas all overviews of the Italian publishing business mention the originality of the Sonzogno trust, its contributions are usually subsumed within the broader wave of print innovations that occurred in Italy in the late nineteenth century. This is in part due to the lack of accessibility to the primary sources related to this firm, in particular the daily newspaper, Il secolo that Sonzogno founded in 1866 (right after the Unification) and quickly became the financial and political engine around which all of Sonzogno’s other initiatives pivoted.