Digitisation of historical newspapers of the German speaking countries: Newspapers of the labour movement 1875 – 1933 and of the National Socialist Party 1928 – 1945 in Hamburg and Harburg

• Applicant: Professor Robert Zepf, since 3/2020
• Subject Area: Communication Sciences
• Term: from 2019 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 422624766

Hamburg was one of the most important centres of the newspaper business in the German speaking countries and, furthermore, a vibrant central point of the German labour movement. Therefore it seems urgent to create digital access to the press of Hamburg’s leftist parties from their very beginnings. This provides insight and enables comparative research into their internal differentiation from right-wing social democrats to the communist party of the Weimar Republic focused on regional newspapers. The Hamburger Echo and its three social democratic predecessors the Hamburger Volkszeitung – in the beginning: Rote Fahne –, the Norddeutsche Zeitung and the Volksblatt für Harburg, Wilhelmsburg und Umgegend comprehensively represent the range of leftist parties.From 1928 onwards they faced the national socialist press at the other end of the political spectrum. The Hamburger Tageblatt and its two antecessors as papers of the NSDAP are part of this project in order to present the full range of political agitation and propaganda in the Hamburg area during the first half of the 20th century. Several liberal and national conservative newspapers published in Hamburg have already been digitised. So they altogether represent all facets of its political landscape of that period. About 315.000 newspaper pages are to be digitised and transformed to machine readable text via OCR in this project. They will be accessible via union catalogues such as the North German GVK and the Zeitschriftendatenbank (ZDB), the union catalogue of serials, and they are to be provided – via an OAI-PMH interface – in ZVDD, in the German Digital Library (DDB) and Europeana as well as in the local newspaper portal.

• DFG Programme: Cataloguing and Digitisation (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)
• Ehemalige Antragstellerin: Dr. Petra Blödorn-Meyer, until 3/2020