Category Archives: Digitised journals

Times past

July 29, 2007 By in Digitised journals, General, Publications, Resources 2 Comments

There are several large-scale digitisation progammes going on world wide which are starting to make substantial numbers of historic newspapers available online, a God-send for anyone engaged in research into early film. Some are freely available, some restricted to universities, some are commercial operations. There are various ways of getting at all of them, and in any case one shouldn’t shy away from paying a little for access to such treasures, given the huge efforts made to digitise them (something I know a little about).

This survey covers some of the major historic newspaper resources available. For each, I’ve tested them out with the word ‘Kinetoscope’ (i.e. Thomas Edison’s peepshow viewer which first exhiited motion picture films to the public, and which was most commercially active in the 1894-1896 period, but carried on as a common term for a few years after that).

Chronicling America

The Library of Congress is co-ordinating a huge newspaper digitisation programme, entitled Chronicling America. The project is sponsored jointly by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress as part of the National Digital Newspaper Program. So far it has digitised selected newspapers for the period 1900-1910, covering California, District of Columbia, Florida, Kentucky, New York, Utah, and Virginia. That’s thirty-six newspapers, including such key titles as The San Francisco Call, The New York Sun, The Washington Times, The Colored American, and The New York Evening Times.

Chronicling America

Searching across all papers and all dates for the word ‘kinetoscope’ got me 71 hits. Clicking on a result gives me a picture of the full page, then options to view the OCR text (i.e. text derived throgh scanning using Optical Character Recognition, which may bring up some small errors), PDF, or I can download the image as a jp2 file. The term I searched for is highlighted on the image, and I can zoom in or out. Each hits gives you the title of the newspaper, the date of the issue, and the page number. On a quick survey of the texts, I saw the Kinetoscope was being commonly used as a generic term for motion pictures, rather than the Edison machine specifically.

Chronicling America is free to all, easy to use, and is certain to grow as the phased digitisation programme develops. The site has background information, including technical details for those entranced by TIFFs and JPEGs.

Times Digital Archive

Probably the most outstanding of the newspaper digitisation programmes, and the one that has had a great impact on research across any number of disciplines, is the Times Digital Archive. This is a commercial operation, managed by Thomson Gale. It offers every page from the London Times 1785-1985. It is possible to search for a term or phrase across all dates, a specific date or a date range, and across all types of section, or restricted to Advertising, Business, Editorial and Commentary, Featurees, News, People and Picture Gallery – this is a very useful feature for narrowing down searches.

Searching on ‘kinetoscope’ across all fields got me 60 hits. As it covers the 1890s period, the rsults were excellent, tracing the Kinetoscope’s appearance in London, from a first mention on 8 March 1894 of Edison’s latest invention, to the surprise discovery that in 1897 there as a racehorse called Kinetoscope (not a very successful racehorse, it seems). Search results cite the date, page, issue number and page column of the relevant article, with the search term highlighted on the page. You can view the relevant article or page as PNG images, or view the page as PDF.

Times Digital Archive

Such a wonderful resource comes at a price. It isn’t freely available, and instead it is made available to institutions in a variety of subscription packages. In the UK, most universities subscribe to it, under the Athens password system (which restricts online resources to UK academic users), but it can also be found in many public libraries. It is also available through subscribing international institutions as well.

Google News Archive

And then there’s the Google News Archive search. Naturally enough Google has provided us with a search engine which browses historic news resources, both free and subscription-based, so you are offered tantalising glimpses of news stories that can be yours if only you’ll pay. Typing in ‘kinetoscope’ yields 2,210 results. The results seem all over the place, but it is possible to narrow down the search by date or newspaper, as Google assesses which areas are likely to yield the most results from your broad search query. It can also arrange results in a handy ‘timeline’ fashion.

Google News Archive

It’s worth noting that many of the subscription sites, such New York Times, give you at least the first few lines of the requested article. Speaking of the NYT, you can pay $4.95 to view a single page, $7.95 a month (up to 100 articles) or $49.95 per year (up to 1,200 articles). Find out more from its TimesSelect service.

The Google News Archive is a wonderful research tool, not least for showing the sheer range of digitised newspaper collections out there, and as a quick spot-check method of seeing when a subject was being discussed, in what way, and by whom. I certainly want to read more of the Los Angeles Times article of 31 March 1897 entitled ‘Kill the Kinetoscope and its Kindred’, with the tantalising opening lines, “The Senate Judiciary Committee did well in reporting favorably the bill to prohibit the exhibition of prize-fight pictures by means of the kinetoscope and kindred devices in the District of Columbia or the Territories of the…”

British Library Newspapers

The British Library maintains the national collection of newspapers (still housed in quaint conditions at Colindale in North London). It has had had for some while a test online historic newspaper service, using Olive Software, which offers some year-long slices from four sample papers: News of the World, Manchester Guardian, Daily News and The Weekly Dispatch, from which only the News of the World gives a Kinetoscope story – on the racehorse, in 1900.

But now the British Library is engaged on a massive British newspaper digitisation programme, with higher education funding money (the JISC Digitisation Programme). The first stage of this, recently completed, has digitised 2 million pages of 19th century newspapers. Stage two, just begun, will add a further 1.1 million pages from 1690-1900. The results, however, will be accessible to UK higher and further education users only.

The lessons to be learned are simply that, if you want serious access to knowledge, you need to pay or to be a student. The number of precious resources being made available only to universities is a problem for the outside researcher, though that’s where the money is coming from, and in many cases it’s the only way of getting round licensing restrictions.

What else is out there?

There are commercial sites, such as ProQuest, which is a world leader in providing access to digitised resources to institutions, including historic newspapers. Like a number of these services, it offers free trials – but only to institutions. The massive NewspaperARCHIVE.com welcomes individuals. It boasts over 68 million pages, and lets you know your search results for free, so Kinetoscope yielded a tantalising 2,923 hits. Annual membership starts at $8.95 per month.

But there are many smaller initiatives to look out for. A while back, I wrote a post on The Silent Worker, a newspaper for the deaf, which had many articles on the deaf and silent films. I found the information on that from the British Columbia Digital Library, which has a very useful listing of digitised newspaper collections around the world. And if you are frustrated at not being able to get hold of subscription-based collections, I recommend the Godfrey Memorial Library, an American library specialising in genealogy resources which for a very cheap annual subscription (from $35.00) offers access to a large number of newspaper libraries, including the Times Digital Archive.

There’s so much out there. If you know of other collections, or directories of information, do let me know.

The Silent Worker

July 8, 2007 By in Audience, Deaf cinema, Digitised journals, Publications 6 Comments

Granville Redmond and Charlies Chaplin

Granville Redmond and Charlie Chaplin

While preparing a post on the digitisation of newspaper collections (which you’ll receive some other time), I came across one journal of such particular interest that it had to have a post to itself.

The Silent Worker was a popular American journal for the deaf, published between 1888 and 1929. Most of the articles were written by hearing-impaired authors. The entire run of the journal has been digitised by Gallaudet University Library. If you go to the search options, and click on subjects, you will find 70 articles on ‘Movies and Deaf’.

I don’t know if there has been much in the way of studies made of the relationship between deafness and silent cinema, though the Chicago Institute for the Moving Image has a Festival for Cinema of the Deaf which has included silent films, and in 1891 the pre-cinema pioneer Georges Demenÿ famously used a proto-moving image camera to show someone mouthing the words ‘Je vous aime’ as a demonstration of how moving images might aid deaf mutes in learning to speak. And there are many anecdotes of deaf lip-readers discovering the fruity language spoken in films like What Price Glory? which had escaped the eye of the censors. And it has been argued that Lon Chaney’s particular acting gifts came in part through both his parents being deaf.

The Silent Worker reveals a rich world where deaf audiences, and deaf creative talents, engage with the silent picture. For example, an article entitled ‘Cinema and “Signs”‘ (October 1916) compares the art of pantomime with that of the silent screen, with particular reference to Billy Merson and Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin gets many mentions, and there is an engrossing piece, ‘Moving Pictures and the Deaf’ (June 1918) by Alice T. Terry (not the actress Alice Terry), who describes a visit to Hollywood and the Chaplin Studios, where she encounters Granville Redmond (illustrated above with Chaplin), a painter and deaf-mute, who acted in A Dog’s Life and The Kid. Chaplin is revealed to have been notably accommodating towards the deaf (has anyone written on this?). Her opinions are full of interest:

Unlike the spoken drama, the deaf can enjoy moving pictures as much as the hearing do. Some may say that the deaf lose, as they do not hear the music that acompanies the pictures. But I do not think we lose; there are various ways in which we are compensated but the hearing would hardly understand if we tried to explain. For myself I hate the noisy show, that is where some struggle or a battle is going on with its accompanying loud imitation battle din. To me the vibrations are a continuous, growling thunder – or worse than that – which sickens me soul and body. In fact most all musical vibrations irritate me. But by many of the deaf I know that the vibrations are enjoyed, especially by those with some remnant of hearing.

She also has trenchant opinions on D.W. Griffith, whose The Birth of a Nation “worked a great injury to the colored race”. Elsewhere, there are reports on the production of films for the deaf, including a Professor G.W. Jones who filmed speeches from Shakespeare.

One article, ‘Preserving a Famous Film’ sounds remarkably archival for April 1912, though its subject is actually the preservation on film of notable practitioners of sign language. The are also reports on Helen Keller, who starred as herself in a dramatised film of her life in 1919, entitled Deliverance (her teacher Annie Sullivan also appeared in the film).

That’s what I’ve gleaned through a quick inspection, and clearly there much more that could be unearthed. Here’s some last words, written by Alexander L. Pach, for the October 1919 issue:

We deaf people must thank the screen-art for the one biggest offset to our infirmity. Good pictures and by good pictures I mean the kind that educate and elevate, are the levers that lift us from the deadly dullness and monotony of total deafness, to the highest pinnacles of delight. They restore our hearing as nothing else does. We know every word that is spoken as well as the hearing do, for they are all projected on the screen. We only miss the music, and this is such a slight loss it doesn’t count … All the best plays of the spoken stage that have delighted millions of hearing people find their way to “Screenland”, and such big hits as “Common Clay”, “Daddy Long-legs”, “The Thirteenth Chair”, “Secret Service” etc. etc., are ours through this media. An evening at a good picture house now means one of those hits of the drama; a News-Weekly that has the whole world for its field … a more or less “funny” picture that makes us laugh whether we want to or not and then Burton Holmes shows us the people, the customs and the homes of some far away denizens of the other side of the earth. After an evening of delightful entertainment of this order one may go home utterly forgetful of the fact that an important sense is missing. He has come away refreshed. The tedium of the every day work of store, office of factory has been relieved in great measure, and we feel it’s a bully good little world after all …

There are such treasures to be found on the web. Let’s all keep on looking.