King's Digital Lab

Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition

A minimalist bar chart with blue vertical bars of varying heights against a dark background, creating a structured data visualisation.

The Nineteenth Century Serials Edition (ncse) is an edition of six nineteenth-century periodicals and newspapers: the Monthly Repository (1806-1837); Northern Star (1837-1852); Leader (1850-1860); English Woman’s Journal (1858-1864); Tomahawk (1867-1870); Publishers’ Circular (1880-1890). It is large and varied resource, containing well over 400,000 articles that originally appeared in roughly 3500 issues published during a span of 84 years. It was the result of an AHRC-funded collaboration between Birkbeck College, King's College London, Olive Software, and the British Library that ran from 2005 to the project launch in 2008. In 2017, concerned about vulnerabilities in the software, the Facsimiles component was taken offline. Shortly afterwards, work began at King's Digital Lab on a replacement viewer, launched in October 2018.

This online edition of six nineteenth-century periodicals and newspapers comprises two main components: a repository of full-page facsimiles and textual transcripts generated through OCR; and an index of semantic keywords and person, place and institution names, generated using data mining and natural language processing techniques. Both components of the system are fully searchable and include rich, bibliographic metadata attached to titles, volumes, issues, departments and articles within the edition. These components were developed in the first version of the resource and multiple interconnections were provided between them so that users could discover content (including images) via different pathways. In a second major phase (2017-18) KDL explored the data produced by Olive Software as part of the earlier production process and, modifying a viewer produced for another project, developed a platform through which NCSE content could be accessed once more by configuring a new server for the facsimile component, implementing a viewer with browsing and searching functionalities, and associated design interfaces. In addition, using some of the staff 10% exploratory time and falling within KDL’s Data Visualisation research theme, some visualisations of the statistics of the periodicals were tested with project partners and added to the site. With the most recent work on the project, KDL applied lessons learned from the Archiving and Sustainability approach the Lab has developed over the last ten years and furthered this research into sustainability for digital resources. This phase has seen KDL exporting data from both components of the project into King’s College London’s research data management system to preserve it, as well as to maintain its accessibility in the face of technological change and the need to adapt to reduced funding for maintaining the full current version of the resource. These questions are critical for a range of digital outputs and supporting the NCSE project during this phase both enables the future sustainability of this resource and increases our understanding of what is, and is not, possible for other resources of this type.

Team