Beyond the Headlines: AI and Historical Newspapers

Historical newspapers hold stories that shaped our communities, but the sheer volume of their pages has long limited what we could discover within them. What changes when we can digitize and then analyze millions of pages at once? This event, co-hosted by BPL Digital Services and the Leventhal Map & Education Center, explores how computational text analysis is transforming historical newspaper research. From newspaper collecting that began in the wake of the American Revolution to training datasets to reveal large-scale patterns, they'll examine what becomes possible when computational methods meet cultural heritage — and what responsibilities come with these new capabilities.