2021 IIIF Annual Conference

1. IIIF for Interoperability and
Dissemination of Research
Results
The NewsEye European Project Use Case
Axel Jean-Caurant (Université de La Rochelle)
Guillaume Michez (Bibliothèque Nationale de France)
Jean-Philippe Moreux (Bibliothèque Nationale de France)
Nejma Omari (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3)
This project has received funding from the
European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and
innovation programme under grant agreement No
770299.

2. The NewsEye Project
Motivations
● Tens of millions of pages are digitized in various languages.
● Our objective is to support qualitative and quantitative analysis of newspaper data for the humanities.
● We want to develop tools specific to the analysis of
historical press.
● Project website: https://www.newseye.eu
● Demonstrator: https://platform.newseye.eu

3. The NewsEye Project
Organisation
8 partners in 4 countries:
● University of La Rochelle (CS)
● National library of Austria
● University of Helsinki (CS, Humanities, National library)
● University of Innsbruck (CS, Humanities)
● National library of France
● University of Rostock (CS)
● University of Montpellier (Humanities)
● University of Vienna (Humanities
More than 180,000 issues from 20 newspapers,
from 1850 to 1950.

4. The NewsEye platform

5. The NewsEye platform

6. IIIF in the NewsEye project
● As a consumer:
- Thumbnails in
search results
- Viewer in
documents
show page

7. IIIF in the NewsEye project
● As a consumer:
- Thumbnails in
search results
- Viewer in
documents
show page
● As a producer:
- IIIF Image server
for documents from
the National Library
of Finland
- Articles as annotations
- Named entities as tags

8. Dissemination of Research Results
● Heritage institutions can
disseminate more metadata
with IIIF
● Researchers can share
annotations and transcriptions
● Institutions may wish to benefit
from the work of researchers
DH Team #1: NewsEye project

9. Corpora as IIIF Collections
National or thematic corpora
used by the project are
described as IIIF collections.
● Instant access to the
data and reuse (parsing,
scripting...)
● Browsing in any IIIF
viewer (for humans)
● Can be accessed
through a server or
archived as research
data (dumps, datasets)
NewsEye French dataset of periodicals (Mirador 3)
Le Matin (1936)

10. Researcher Datasets as IIIF Collections
NewsEye Dataset
● Still a work-in-progress
● Exports document manifest
as a IIIF collection
● Two layers of annotations will
be included in the manifests:
○ All articles in the issue
○ Only articles that are
part of the dataset

11. Storytelling for Digital Humanities
How can researchers in humanities and social sciences
showcase digital collections ?
● A challenge for any researcher who wishes to publicize research results
to the general public
● Different ways to showcase: examples from the NewsEye project

12. Storytelling for Digital Humanities
Exhibit: a IIIF storytelling tool for an interactive experience
● Shareable, image-based stories through
annotation and deep zoom
● A tool developed by Mnemoscene with support
from the Esmée Fairbairn Collections Fund
● A project initiated during the Covid-19 pandemic
to meet the needs of The University of
St. Andrews in online and on-campus teaching
● Use of universal Viewer, an open source IIIF viewer
Other tools: Storiiies (Cogapp), Tesselle (Médialab SciencesPo)...

13. Storytelling for Digital Humanities
https://exhibit.so/exhibits/lJBQVwAjXirDsniiWhI5
An example of narration from a blogpost
● For Newseye, links between the media
treatment of the Coronavirus crisis and, 100
years earlier, that of the “spanish flu”
● Narration from blogpost about remedies claiming
to work miracles against the 1918 flu, available
in French on Gallica blog.
● Issues from the daily (Le Matin, Le Gaulois) and
weekly press (Le Pêle-mêle, La Baïonnette,
Le Régiment)
Nejma
Omari

14. Storytelling for Digital Humanities
https://exhibit.so/exhibits/eqQM5fzMPvpRc3wjnX7t
Another example based on NewsEye case studies
● Case studies about gender, especially about
women rights through the press of the 19th
century
● Many blogposts and articles produced on the
right to wear pants, to vote or to practice
journalism for women
● Example of a blogpost written for Gallica’s blog
about abortion (published for Simone Veil law
anniversary)
Nejma
Omari

15. Storytelling for Digital Humanities
A tool to explore the medium specificities
https://exhibit.so/exhibits/jXYUORB0yxW2rZYGRFvg
● Show how newspapers are composed
● Explore the different journalistic
forms and sections
● Identify changes in the layouts

16. Thanks!
Resources:
● https://platform.newseye.eu
● https://github.com/altomator/IIIF/b
lob/main/collection
jean-philippe.moreux@bnf.fr
axel.jean-caurant@univ-lr.fr
nejma.omari@univ-montp3.fr
guillaume.michez@bnf.fr

17. Searchable text
Searching in the OCR produced by the
project, within a corpora or dataset,
can be implemented using the IIIF
Search API.