CrossAsia ITR-Newspaper Explorer
The CrossAsia ITR-Newspaper Explorer is a new member of the ITR-Explorer family focusing on newspaper materials. Similar to ITR-Explorer, it provides CJK (Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters) mapping, phrase searching and result set manipulation (using ∩ (AND), U (OR) and – (AND NOT) operators) for users to build more complex search results sets (for more details, see our previous blog post https://blog.crossasia.org/neue-funktionen-im-crossasia-itr-explorer/). ITR’s Newspaper Explorer introduces a new heat map visualisation that makes full use of the fine-granular data nature of newspapers and provides a better way to observe time distribution at different scales, from decade, year, month to day level.
In this first release, the CrossAsia ITR-Newspaper Explorer offers a diverse collection of four newspaper sources in Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, English and German. These four data sources cover a period from 1882 to 2012. As with other ITR family members such as CrossAsia Fulltext Search and ITR Explorer, CrossAsia ITR Newspaper Explorer is committed to continually integrating new data sources to ensure a constantly evolving and enriching user experience.
Currently included Newspaper Sources:
| 1882-1894 | Neueste-Mittheilungen (13.855 articles) | German |
| 1832-1998 | Historical Newspapers of China and South China Morning Post (10.450.568 articles) | English |
| 1902-1949 | Ta-kung Pao -大公報 (2.912.830 articles) | T. Chinese |
| 1949-2009 | People’s Daily -人民日报 (1.594.631 articles) | S. Chinese |
The Heat Map visualisation uses different colour depth (light to dark red) to show the result distribution in decade (the 1st row), year (the 2nd row) and month (the 3rd row). Each time block represents all articles published in that period (in terms of year, month and day). Selecting a time block will activate the alignment of all other time rows, moving the nearest time block to the beginning of each row (fig.1). The list of titles at the end of the page will adjust accordingly, showing all articles published in the selected time block including a link to call up the issue or article in the original platform (fig.2).
Please note that depending on your search term huge result sets are returned and loading might take some time.
Fig.1: Heatmap distribution for “Berlin OR 柏林” in all four newspaper ressources. In the “year row” 1933 has been selected, so the rows for month and day adjusted accordingly.
Fig.2: Disply of all articles within the selected time period that match the search criteria. The link in the last column needs an authentication as CrossAsia user and leeds to either the article or the issue with the respective article. If the material is open access, you can obtain it directly.
