Half FullandHalf Empty

Prior to digitization, newspaper research was primarily undertaken by historianspolitical, local, social, cultural, art, scientific, legal or literary -who had reason and time to trawl slowly through bound volumes of unwieldy and desiccated broadsheets or, when paper copy was unavailable, to manage microfilm. While the great majority of historians consulted newspaper content in search of other topics, a small number researched the medium itself. Re-mediation of historical newspapers in digital forms has not only awakened thousands of later readers to the nineteenth-century press, but enabled them to search broadly, deeply and quickly. Moreover, additions to the contents of the print corpus are considerable: new digital editions of historical media offer an opportunity to create complete runs where gaps may exist in individual libraries; and unlike print, errors in publishing can be easily corrected, the corpus initially digitized can be expanded should newspaper issues or supplementary material be found, and users can comment on or correct editions in ways that echo interaction between print media and their first readers, in correspondence columns, answers and sales. This flexibility is only a potential of the technology, though, and remains dependent on the willingness of commercial publishers to fund staff and time to take on irregular stints of quality control. Nevertheless, some publishers have delivered on corrections, expansions and updates. It is also theoretically possible to link digitally published research articles on serials with the historical archive, should publishers permit it, in order to share work with those interested and build a locus of current research around the source, which can be discussed onsite. NINES is a platform that enables user sharing and interchange. 1 The availability of a swathe of nineteenth-century newspaper titles means that The Times should never again appear as an isolated authority for historical events or trends and, more generally, that the impetus to comparative work is considerable, and facilitating. Given text mining and sophisticated search software, the study of media is open to many ingenious search structures and in unexpected sources.