digital 'Donau-Zeitung'

Donau-Zeitung digital. A project commemorating the anniversary year 1914/2014 (2014)

The 100th anniversary of the outbreak of World War I on August 1, 2014, was an important date for the city of Passau and the region of Eastern Bavaria. To ensure that this event and its impact on the region are not forgotten, online sources on the war and everyday life in 1914 were made available to the public. In cooperation with the University of Passau, the Passau State Library, and the Passauer Neue Presse newspaper, a digital archive of the historic Donau-Zeitung newspaper was created. From August 1 to December 31, 2014, digitized newspaper editions published exactly one hundred years earlier were published daily.

To the Donauzeitung digital website (german)

The Donau-Zeitung was created in 1847 from the merger of the “Kurrier an der Donau,” which had existed since 1785/90, with the “Passavia.” It was considered the most important daily newspaper in Passau and eastern Lower Bavaria and was the mouthpiece of political Catholicism in the region. In 1889, it became the property of Passavia AG and, between 1938 and 1945, it came into the possession of Gauverlag Bayerische Ostmark as part of the Nazi Gleichschaltung and deconfessionalization.

Project description

• High-quality digitization of the Donau-Zeitung newspaper for the war year 1914.
• Full text capture using optical character recognition (OCR) technology.
• Manual correction of three selected articles from each issue
• Gradual development of a database and text corpus for contemporary historical research using modern text analysis methods

Offer for readers

• Daily publication of the issue from exactly one hundred years ago for reading on screen (digitized images)
• Reading material for three selected articles on the topics of war, politics, and Passau & the surrounding area
• Retroactive access to the entire digital archives

Technical parameters

• Digitization in 600 ppi with 16.7 million colors at the Passau State Library
• Storage of master files in uncompressed TIFF
• Web publication of image files in JPEG format
• OCR by ABBYY Recognition Server and manual correction of selected articles

Project team

• Prof. Dr. Malte Rehbein (idea and project management)
• Dr. Øyvind Eide (project coordination)
• Annette Diegel (scanning, article selection, OCR, correction)
• Nina Langbein (scanning, article selection, OCR, correction)
• Bernhard Doll (systemdevelopment)

The digitization of the Donau-Zeitung was also a study project for students of digital humanities at the University of Passau.

We would like to expressly thank Dr. Markus Wennerhold and the staff of the Passau State Library for providing the digitization infrastructure, Martin Wanninger and Dr. Imme Oldenburg from Passauer Neue Presse for their support, and the Passauer Neue Presse Foundation for funding this project.