ABOUT
A reading room for
old newspapers.
Ink lets you read historical newspapers and magazines story by story, with the original page beside the text. Every word you read can be checked against the scan it came from.
What you are reading
The text comes from OCR: software that read the printed page, not a person. It is often right and sometimes badly wrong, especially with small type, worn microfilm and old typefaces. Ink shows it as it was read. When the text and the scan disagree, trust the scan, and use the side-by-side view to compare them.
A block is one region cut from a page, with the text read from it. It may be a whole story, part of one, several stories, or an advertisement. Most papers here are read as blocks: nothing is claimed about where one story ends and the next begins.
A full article is a story put back together across its columns and pages. Where a model did that grouping, the article says so and marks it as not yet reviewed. Born-digital articles and magazines with their own tables of contents arrive already whole.
We do not quietly correct the text. If corrections are made, supplied characters will be marked, so what was printed stays distinguishable from what was inferred.
Where the pages come from
Rappahannock News ↗
The paper's own archive: page scans and OCR from a complete vendor digitization, and its born-digital articles.
Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut, Berlin ↗
Digitized Latin American periodicals.
State newspaper archives on Open ONI ↗
Page scans and OCR text published by state digitization programs.
Library of Congress, Chronicling America ↗
Page scans and OCR text from the National Digital Newspaper Program. Scans are shown directly from the Library of Congress image service.
The Sunday Telegram · The Daily Dispatch · Highland Recorder · The Cordele Dispatch · Farmville Herald
Rights and source statements travel with each issue; see the line under an issue's title and each article's citation details.
Who makes it
Ink is built by Survos, which makes tools for museums, archives and local history. It is a work in progress: coverage grows paper by paper, and some issues are still awaiting text.