ABSTRACT
Mass digitisation of newspapers over the last decade has vastly increased their use and usefulness in historical research at all levels from undergraduate essays to academic monographs. In qualitative terms, they allow easier pinpointing of coverage of specific events and persons, comparisons across time and between territories, and much else besides. However, digitised newspapers also offer considerable opportunities for asking and answering quantitative research questions: for example, they frequently contain financial data unavailable elsewhere, and they facilitate a quantitative, content analysis approach to language change that is generally otherwise untenable. Using examples from nineteenth-century Irish and British fundraising history, this chapter will explore the practicalities, benefits and drawbacks of digitised newspapers as an historical source.
