Documenting Social Unrest: Detecting Strikes in Historical Daily Newspapers

摘要

The identification of relevant historical sources such as news-papers and letters and the extraction of information from them is an essential part of historical research. In this work, our aim is the detection of relevant primary sources with the goal to support researchers working on a specific historical event. We focus on the historical daily Dutch newspaper archive of the National Library of the Netherlands and strike events that happened in the Netherlands during the 1980s. Using a manually compiled database of strikes in the Netherlands, we first attempt to find reports on those strikes in historical daily newspapers by automatically associating database records to the daily press of the time covering the same strike. Then, we generalise our methodology to detect strike events in the press not currently covered by the strikes database, and support in this way the extension of secondary historical resources, Our methods are evaluated against the manually constructed database of strikes.