A source like any other?: including digitized newspapers into a “hybrid” research project

Abstract

This contribution discusses the potentials and challenges of using digitised newspapers as a source in relation to other newspaper collections, digitised or not. The author argues that digitisation makes the pitfall of media-centrism even more visible and calls for an even more careful contextualisation of media sources. Instead of focusing too narrowly on a sample of seemingly “representative” digitised newspapers, digitisation may in fact invite us to multiply the types of sources and perspectives we include in our research. Dealing with such diverse sources, both digitized and non-digitized, requires that we highlight how we think about, construct, and analyse our corpus. Ultimately, digitisation can lead to a more exploratory and iterative research approach and thus an understanding of the research corpus as an evolving, interconnected, and reflexive collection of diverse sources.