Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (ncse) è un progetto realizzato da alcune università britanniche in collaborazione con la British Library che consente di visualizzare e scaricare gratuitamente le riproduzioni facsimilari di sei pubblicazioni periodiche inglesi (quotidiani e riviste) pubblicate nel XIX secolo.
E’ stato messo a punto anche un prezioso data base interrogabile per parole chiave (funzione search) o per scorrimento liste (funzione browse) che indicizza nomi di persona, luoghi, nomi di istituzioni che compaiono negli articoli, oltre ai descrittori semantici che sono stati associati alle singole unità documentarie per facilitare i lettori nella ricerca di temi o argomenti specifici.
Questo l’elenco delle pubblicazioni e delle annate disponibili:
“Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (ncse) is a free, online scholarly edition of six nineteenth-century periodicals and newspapers. It is a collaboration between Birkbeck, University of London, King’s College London (Centre for Computing in the Humanities and the Department of English), the British Library, and Olive Software.
This three year project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) seeks to publish and preserve selected 19th Century periodicals and newspapers. The records were chosen for digitisation not only for their individual significance, but also because they represent under researcher areas. They include significant weeklies and monthlies spanning a variety of subjects and readerships: Northern Star (mid-century; working-class); Monthly Repository and its supplement the Unitarian Chronicle (radical, middle-class, Unitarian); Leader (progressive, liberal, secular); English Woman’s Journal (mid-century, feminist); Tomahawk (satirical); Publishers’ Circular (print trade). By conceiving of multiple titles across the century as a single edition, it is hoped that it broadens the research reach of 19th Century historical research.
To start browsing the journals, click facsimiles.
The edition is formed of two integrated components: the ‘Facsimile’ component – a repository of full-page facsimiles and textual transcripts generated through OCR; and the ‘Keyword’ component – an index of semantic keywords and person, place and institution names, generated using data mining and natural language processing techniques. Both components of the system are fully searchable and include rich, bibliographic metadata attached to titles, volumes, issues, departments and articles within the edition.
ncse includes full runs of the first five titles, and a decade only of the Publishers’ Circular. Titles are represented as completely as possible, including multiple editions, advertisements, wrappers, and supplements where we could find them.
All six journals are segmented to article level, and can be downloaded freely.
URL: <http://www.ncse.ac.uk/index.html>