Digitization of historical newspapers

The digitization of historical newspapers is a project of the newly founded “Digital Humanities Laboratory for Cross-Border Historical Research.” At the Passau site, the two Lower Bavarian regional newspapers “Kurier für Niederbayern” and “Passauer Zeitung” were digitally recorded for the period of the war years 1914–1918.

The newspapers were first digitized in high quality, then captured in full text using OCR (Optical Character Recognition). Subsequently, manual quality improvement was carried out (article segmentation and correction of article headings). The resulting data was published under a Creative Commons license and can be used online without access restrictions. Further information can be found on the corresponding web portal (see below).