The Digital Archiving of Historical Political Cartoons: An Introduction

Political (editorial) cartoons often capture the Zeitgeist of society and convey a message. Increasingly, historians study them to understand commentaries of past events or personalities. Visual culture as an academic subject could be greatly enhanced if this information can be digitally archived. We employ crowdsourcing to obtain valuable metadata by guiding volunteers' feedback using an online survey with 31 targeted questions. We provide intellectual access to a set of about 300 cartoons of a single creator spanning over multiple years in a highly interactive search engine.

The Digital Archiving of Historical Political Cartoons: An Introduction

Political (editorial) cartoons often capture the Zeitgeist of society and convey a message. Increasingly, historians study them to understand commentaries of past events or personalities. Visual culture as an academic subject could be greatly enhanced if this information can be digitally archived. We employ crowdsourcing to obtain valuable metadata by guiding volunteers' feedback using an online survey with 31 targeted questions. We provide intellectual access to a set of about 300 cartoons of a single creator spanning over multiple years in a highly interactive search engine

Digital Archiving at the Meertens Institute

The Meertens Institute is also a memory institution, where records are digitally preserved and curated. This talk will give an overview of the different types of records currently digitally curated at the Meertens Institute. We highlight our recent projects, such as the Sailing Letters project, where we use crowd sourcing to transcribe centuries-old handwritten letters, or the Radical Political Representation project, where we crowd source the analysis of political cartoons. These are all exemplary Digital Humanities cases, and we show our approach to the digital archiving of these materials, from creation to (re-)use.

Nederlab: Visual Analytics in a Virtual Research Environment for Humanities

Nederlab (www.nederlab.nl) is a virtual research environment or laboratory for research on the patterns of change in the Dutch language and culture. Linguists and historians could use Nederlab to research Dutch language and cultural heritage by searching for and having interactive access to large amounts of historical texts and rich and structured metadata describing these resources. The text collections covered by Nederlab include literature i.e. fiction and non-fiction resources, massive amounts of newspaper articles, and the list of collections is set to increase. We demonstrate as example a concrete scenario for literary scholars, and show when, how and which visual analytics on metadata are powerful tools for exploring, finding, collecting and analyzing these texts for (historical and language) research. This includes visualizing the temporal and spatial dimensions for interactive search, and other contextual information such as the names and gender of authors, and comparative analytics of selected results.