Mining Historical Advertisements in Digitised Newspapers

Historians have turned their focus to newspaper articles as a proxy of public discourse, while advertisements remain an understudied source of digitized information. This paper shows how historians can use computational methods to work with extensive collections of advertisements. Firstly, this chapter analyzes metadata to better understand the different types of advertisements, which come in a wide range of shapes and sizes. Information on the size and position of advertisements can be used to construct particular subsets of advertisements. Secondly, this chapter describes how textual information can be extracted from historical advertisements, which can subsequently be used for a historical analysis of trends and particularities. For this purpose, we present a case study based on cigarette advertisements.