Humanities & Social Sciences 4 (2016 9) 994-1006 ~ ~ ~ УДК 303.436.2:004.352 From Digital Resources to Historical Scholarship with the British Library 19th Century Newspaper Collection Ian Gregory, Paul Atkinson, Andrew Hardie, Amelia Joulain-Jay, Daniel Kershaw, Catherine Porter, Paul Rayson and CJ Rupp* Lancaster University Lancaster LA1 4YT United Kingdom Received 04.12.2015, received in revised form 20.01.2016, accepted 18.03.2016 It is increasingly acknowledged that the Digital Humanities have placed too much emphasis on data creation and that the major priority should be turning digital sources into contributions to knowledge. <...> While this sounds relatively simple, doing it involves intermediate stages of research that enhance digital sources, develop new methodologies and explore their potential to generate new knowledge from the source. <...> While these stages are familiar in the social sciences they are less so in the humanities. <...> In this paper we explore these stages based on research on the British Library’s Nineteenth Century Newspaper Collection, a corpus of many billion words that has much to offer to our understanding of the nineteenth century but whose size and complexity makes it diffi cult to work with. <...> Introduction Elsewhere we have argued that the biggest challenge for digital historians is to take the wealth of digital resources that are in existence and use these to create new scholarship that makes applied contributions to our knowledge that are of interest to historians beyond digital history (Gregory 2014). <...> Large amounts of historical sources have been digitised at signifi cant expense to both the public and private sectors and it has been claimed that historians have failed to make a good return © Siberian Federal University. <...> Critics focus on the relatively poor quality of much digitised material and often argue that the bulk of the work done using these sources simply makes uncritical – and often unacknowledged – use of key-word searches and other basic functionality provided by the web interfaces through which the sources are made available (Hitchcock 2013). <...> However, the journey Ian Gregory, Paul Atkinson… From Digital Resources to Historical Scholarship with the British Library 19th Century. from digitised source <...>