African American Newspapers, 1827-1998
Database Review
Product Overview and Description
The African American Newspapers 1827-1998 database is a digitized collection of 282 U.S.-based newspapers that cover African American history and culture during this specified period. This unique collection offers comprehensive access to press coverage of African American life during the Antebellum South, the spread of abolitionism, the emergence of the Black church, the Jim Crow Era, the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance, the Civil Rights Movement, and the leaders of these periods. This archive provides full, digitized access to a wide range of newspapers published in 40 states. Most newspapers in this archive are limited to one or only several issues for the 171 years of articles covered.
History. Provenance. Digitization Background
Provided by Readex (a division of NewsBank, Inc.), this database draws on over 80 years of institutional expertise. According to the Readex website, newspapers in this archive are “newly digitized” and represent the most extensive African American newspaper archives in the world. The materials are amassed (and perhaps digitized) from major archival collections, including the Wisconsin Historical Society, the Kansas State Historical Society, and the Library of Congress.
This collection is curated based on James Philip Danky’s (1998) book: African-American Newspapers and Periodicals: A National Bibliography. This collection can be cross-searched with other Readex collections, including America’s Historical Newspapers, Black Life in America, and various era-specific collections that chronicle African American life and culture.
User Interface, Navigation, and Searching
The interface and navigation of the African American Newspapers 1827-1998 database mirror the style of other Readex Historical Newspapers, including Caribbean American, America’s Historical Newspapers, and the American Business Mercantile Newspaper archive. These standards include a Hero Image design style with a top bar and top menu.
Users can search the newspaper database through a basic or advanced search. The basic search allows users to enter keyword (s) or phrase words to generate results matching search terms within a single newspaper or across multiple newspapers. In addition to keyword searches, users can search articles by date range and geographic location. Users can also search by publication name, publication location, article type, language, eras in American history, U.S. Presidential era, decade, and a specific year. Users can browse full-text, complete issues of periodicals in this database.
Search results provide image reproductions of the original newspaper. Once you identify search results, users can preview the article portion with the search word or phrase highlighted in yellow and view the specific article in the context of its full-text publication issue. Users can download or export images as PDFs, cite sources generated by searches, and receive automatically generated, copyable citations in various formats. The user can email search items to one or more recipients. The user can save the search separately or alongside other searches by creating a personal folder account via the “My Folder” link in the top-right header.
The user can also access the Readex Text Explore tool, integrated into database searches, to visualize linguistic and thematic patterns within a single periodical or across multiple periodicals through its snapshot view of the Voyant Tool. By selecting one or more search results, users can click the “Explore” tab to the right of the “Save” button. Explore activates the Voyant Tool, which enables users to perform computational analysis of search terms, including term clustering, frequencies, and trends, and to see linguistic and thematic patterns in a single work or across multiple works. Voyant Tool is flexible and allows modification of search terms, with real-time updates to the visualization panel. Users can sort results by best match, newest, and oldest content. The articles reviewed are indexed, which helps with cross-database searches.
The top bar includes Help, Change Databases, and Share Feedback buttons. Using the top bar features, users can access the Help button. This seventeen-page document, comprising text and images, provides in-depth instructions on searching the database, working with search results, and using documents, as well as the terms of use, privacy policy, and browser requirements. Left navigators offer options for customizing the visualization of corpus documents. Users can export findings in various formats, including URLs, HTML snippets, or images. User feedback buttons appear at the top and the bottom bars of the database. The option to toggle between databases is also at the top bar. This database does not include an audio feedback option.
Access
This database partners with “renowned repositories, libraries, and historical societies to create authoritative digital collections” that are accessible by subscription. The Sales Department provides additional services, including educational lesson plans. Users must abide by the terms of use when accessing the database. All content included on this database is Readex property or the property of their content providers and protected by copyright law.
Review and Reception
The Readex website posts database reviews under the “Impact in the Classroom” and “Recent Praise” links. The website did not post reviews for this particular database. A web search unearthed a 2010 review of the Wagner College Horrmann Library, posted on its library blog, which describes a “unique online collection that offers unprecedented insights into African American history, culture, and daily life”.
Critical Evaluation
Scholars of history, African American life, and culture would likely appreciate this resource, though most of the newspapers in this database offer only partial collections. Some search results are clearer than others due to the age of the newspapers, variations in typeface and font, and the digitization and OCR conversion processes, which affect the readability of text from earlier publications. Additionally, black newspapers of ten U.S. states are missing from this collection, and some states are overrepresented, including California, the District of Columbia, Illinois, and Kansas.
The database was relatively easy to navigate. A more prominent ‘Help’ button and instructions on how to use the Text Explorer feature, which provides the desired Digital Humanities tools, would have made the database easier to use. The key to successfully accessing and using the Text Explorer tools in this database is to view the five-minute promotional video demonstration produced by Readex and posted to the Readex Blog on September 08, 2020.
Issues Observed
The Explore option is identified on the database as a “new” feature prominently displayed in red letters to the right of the “Text Explorer” tab. Instructions for using the Text Explorer are missing from the Help PDF. Readex should update the Help feature to allow users to access the Text Explorer demonstration video and remove Internet Explorer, an obsolete web browser, from the list of required browsers.