Digital press archives for media and communication history research: From “reading rooms” to virtual research environments

Digitization facilitates access to large amounts of news data, a fact that also opens new avenues for research in media and communication history. Such resources allow easy access and retrieval as well as means to automatically process relevant materials. The increasing number of digital press archives is particularly valuable for historical research as it offers new insights into the evolution of journalistic language, professional practices, and role performances. This paper surveys current digital sources and reflects on research opportunities and restrictions. To this end, it provides an overview of currently available digital press archives with a focus on German- and English-language archives and offers a typology of archive types along criteria such as availability, accessibility, quality, and usability of the digital source material and its metadata. Simultaneously, it illustrates developments from flat portals to virtual research environments, which arguably offer researchers unprecedented opportunities for establishing personalized workspaces and collaborative research projects. Furthermore, attention is drawn to persistent issues in data compilation, and it is suggested that quantitative computational approaches should be complemented by qualitative analysis and close reading to fully exploit the affordances of current digital press archives.