Chronicling Germany: An Annotated Historical Newspaper Dataset
Abstract
The correct detection of dense article layout and the recognition of characters in historical newspaper pages remains a challenging requirement for Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning applications on historical newspapers in the field of digital history. Digital newspaper portals for historic Germany typically provide Optical Character Recognition (OCR) text, albeit of varying quality. Unfortunately, layout information is often missing, limiting this rich source's scope. Our dataset is designed to enable the training of layout and OCR modells for historic German-language newspapers. The Chronicling Germany dataset contains 693 annotated historical newspaper pages from the time period between 1852 and 1924. The paper presents a processing pipeline and establishes baseline results on in- and out-of-domain test data using this pipeline. Both our dataset and the corresponding baseline code are freely available online. This work creates a starting point for future research in the field of digital history and historic German language newspaper processing. Furthermore, it provides the opportunity to study a low-resource task in computer vision
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2401.16845,
title = {Chronicling Germany: An Annotated Historical Newspaper Dataset},
author = {Christian Schultze and Niklas Kerkfeld and Kara Kuebart and Princilia Weber and Moritz Wolter and Felix Selgert},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2401.16845},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
Dataset available at: https://gitlab.uni-bonn.de/digital-history/Chronicling-Germany-Dataset . Baseline code: https://github.com/Digital-History-Bonn/Chronicling-Germany-Code