How do we have imaginative understanding?
E.H Carr in his classic book on the theory of history, What is History? (1961) wrote about ‘imaginative understanding’ and affirmed:
‘History cannot be written unless the historian can achieve some kind of contact with the mind of those about whom he is writing.’
Trove’s Digitised newspapers
How do we do this? How do we have this ‘imaginative understanding’ of the past? For those writing about Australian history, one answer may be Troves Digitised Newspapers.
Before the internet, before TV, before radio, there were newspapers. This was how generations of Australians learnt about what was happening in their world —locally, nationally, internationally. Analysing the content of historic newspapers, therefore, can illuminate many aspects of Australian history.
Family history, is one such area. My grandmother died young in 1935. Finding the few news articles and personal notices about her and her family are some of my favourite research moments. She is no longer just a pleasant face in photographs. I understand something more of her life.
Of course the major themes of Australian history are also represented. In this, the centenary year of the start of the First World War it is interesting to follow how the war was reported. I like timelines, so was drawn to a diary of the war printed in The Argus (Melbourne newspaper 1848-1957) on 31 October 1914. You can find it here: http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article10814881
It starts with that very well-known event, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in June 1914, and ends with the less-well known event, General Botha putting General Beyer’s rebels to flight in South Africa (29 October 1914). What would it have been like one hundred years ago, taking in what the first five months of war had brought and wondering what would be next?
Trove’s Digitised Newspapers have made it very easy to do this research. It provides access to almost 140 million news articles from over 700 Australian newspapers — spanning the first newspaper printed in Australia (1803) to the mid-20th century. Newspapers included come from each state and territory and are representative of metropolitan, regional and rural Australia.
Searching Trove’s Digitised Newspapers
Searching Trove’s Digitised newspapers is very easy. Start by putting in a general keyword in the simple search box. For instance family historians could kick off by putting in the family names they are searching. You will get lots of results, but facets/filters on the left hand side of the screen allow you to narrow the results down to what you really want. You can find information about this here:
http://help.nla.gov.au/trove/using-trove/digitised-newspapers/searching-in-newspapers
Gold star for text correctors
A special aspect of the digitised newspapers is the crowd of volunteer text correctors who fix up the electronic text that has not been accurately translated by the Optical Character Recognition process. These corrections make the newspapers more searchable. A big, serious gold star for text correctors.
The history spark 