Tracing discourses in digital newspaper collections: A contribution to digital hermeneutics while investigating 'return migration' in historical press coverage

Abstract

Based on a case study on return migration - defined as the movement of emigrants, refugees, prisoners of war, and others back to their country of origin - this paper deals with a historical-critical approach to digital newspaper collections and interfaces. Using discourse driven historical research questions to examine return migration, it highlights the usability and relevance of digital source criticism (OCR issues, digitization process, newspaper title selection, etc.), digital query criticism (selection of keywords or parts of keywords, consequences of length, polysemy, etc.), and interface criticism (possibilities to search, view, select, collect, visualize, contextualization-efforts, metadata, etc.). We argue that due to the complexity of language coupled with intransparent functionalities of newspaper interfaces, distorted, misunderstood or misinterpreted results can occur. Some inherent biases in the digital collections themselves as well as missing metadata and context can lead to distortions that only at a first glance seem trivial and banal.