Introduction
Digital scholarship tools nowadays give scholars multiple options to explore the complex past. They can browse through an interactive timeline, study the massive digitized textual content or explore some of the large events via the newspaper headlines. This project explores issues of narrative time and space. It embraces a conception of geography, of space, as the place can discover the contemporary lives that were linked up to the newspaper articles and time is another fundamental axis of narrative which can be employed for storytelling for digital scholarship. It explores the ways in which new digital tools allow us to understand the newspaper content in the setting of time and space, ways for geography to meet history, via some sophisticated text-mining computational algorithms. The idea is to enable scholars to access the content from various facets, with a view to understanding the articles in the newspaper in a sort of non-conventional approach.
The Data
The “Hong Kong Early Tabloid Newspapers”《香港早期小報》, launched in 2022, has collected tabloid newspapers published in Hong Kong during the 20th century. Contrary to the serious broadsheet newspapers, the tabloid newspapers represent the leisure and entertainment of the masses, covering topics like politics, operas, dramas, comics, and pornographies etc. Here, The Hongkong News from our Hong Kong Early Tabloid Newspapers Collection was analysed through the above-mentioned approaches. The Japanese Occupation holding of The Hongkong News started publication in 1941, right after the Christmas Day surrender of the British Crown Colony, and lasted up to August 17, 1945, the very last week before Hongkong’s liberation. The paper had previously launched in ca.1940 at separate premises in the Crown colony. The Hongkong News as published during the Japanese Occupation offers scholars the voice of Japan from Hong Kong. The uniqueness of this newspaper was also discussed in GWULO which showed case the important historical value of it towards the scholars.
Motivation
Current digital assets could be further utilized to provide value apart from preservation and online access. There were lots of space to optimize the usage of digitized images. Beyond the image, our team will apply various computational techniques to explore more value in this tabloid newspaper. Another challenge for the users is to gain concrete insight from the newspaper content if the corpus concerned is at a large scale. We try to address this challenge by performing headline analysis which would be a useful tool for newspaper topic analytics. To further promote tabloid newspapers’ multifaceted content and improve its accessibility, there were two main objectives in our project. First, two semi-automatic procedures were provided to recognize and extract the newspaper headline. Second, two visualization products were developed to facilitate users accessing our digital repository. Our visualization products not only give scholars insight to headline that appear at different times and spaces but also enable them to address humanities questions, such as “Which battle was the Japanese propaganda focus on at a specific time?” and “How was the Japanese propaganda changed during the war?”.
This project covered 530 issues in The Hongkong News from the year 1942 to 1945. The related dataset was available at CUHK Research Data Repository. The digital image of The Hongkong News was available in our Digital Repository.
Production
Acknowledgement
Hong Kong Early Tabloid Newspapers 香港早期小報 | CUHK Digital Repository