A Digital History Perspective on the Immigrant Press
New technologies have dramatically changed the way we study historical materials. The availability of newspapers and magazines in digital format has enabled us to ask novel questions, as we can examine those collections on a larger scale, beyond what is possible through close reading. The Imagined Homelands project seeks to take advantage of these opportunities and to develop methods for the study of transnational, Finnish culture in North America. Our basic idea is that the textual construction of immigrant newspapers provides clues to how they imagined both past and present homelands.. The immigrant (or ethnic) press took shape between cultures, publishing news from both Finland and North America, sometimes directly copying, but also reminiscing, reflecting, and imagining the conditions of the former homeland. The study of national cultures and nationalism has emphasized how nations are imagined and how images, meanings and symbols construct a sense of community. In this project, we will examine the perceptions of this community as shaped by the immigrant press.
The aim of the project is to explore what the methods of the digital humanities can tell us about the construction of the Finnish press in North America and its relationship to the former and present homeland. A multidisciplinary team will carry out the research using methods of text-reuse detection, and textual genre detection, as well as named entity recognition, enabling both close and distant reading of the substantial data.
The Imagined Homelands project has a strong cultural significance. Finnish newspapers in North America have so far been a relatively under-used resource for researchers and citizens alike. In the future, the newspaper material digitized by the National Library of Finland will be useful for genealogical research, for example, as it will provide invaluable information about the generations who set out in search of a better life on the other side of the Atlantic. During the project, researchers have access to around 350 000 pages of Finnish newspapers and journals, or periodicals, from North America, and the material is already available to everyone to search and read via the digi.kansalliskirjasto.fi service.
The project is funded by the Kone Foundation, 2024–2027, and is based on a cooperation between the Universities of Helsinki and Turku and the National Library of Finland. The PI of the project is Hannu Salmi , University of Turku.
[The main photo of the page: Printing press of the newspaper Työmies, Hancock, Michigan, c. 1910. Image: UMedia, University of Minnesota.]
