A World in Print

This Data Descriptor introduces the dataset Enevældens Nyheder Online (News during Absolutism Online). The Enevældens Nyheder Online (ENO) dataset provides a reconstruction of the contents of major newspapers in Denmark and Norway during the period of Absolutism (1660–1849). The dataset contains approx. 474 million words, created using neural networks designed to process digitised microfilm versions of Danish newspapers as well as a smaller selection of Norwegian publications that were all hitherto illegible for computers. The contributions detail this process and its results, including a way to derive standalone texts from the editions, and the accompanying BERT-model trained on a beta-version of the dataset.