The Library will retire the Newspaper Navigator application on April 21st, 2025. Created by Benjamin Charles Germain Lee while he was in service as a Library of Congress Innovator in Residence, the application has received over 174,000 visitors representing tens of thousands of research experiences. Ben’s project was the first in-house machine learning application developed …
Walk the streets of any U.S. city today, and you might come across historic markers or masonry etchings indicating what the buildings used to be. It is always fascinating to learn what our neighborhoods, cities, and towns used to be —factories turned residences, street names changed, the places and spaces our predecessors lived, ate, and …
On September 15, 2020, the Library of Congress announced the release of Newspaper Navigator, an experimental web application which makes 1.5 million photographs from the dataset from Chronicling America available to the public to explore for the first time. Read more about the design and features of the project below or jump straight to the newly launched application at https://news-navigator.labs.loc.gov/search !
Projects like Newspaper Navigator are busy unlocking even more digital content for members of the public to access from home. On May 7th at 2pm EST, Innovator in Residence Ben Lee will host a virtual data jam to experiment and play with thousands of images—including maps, advertisements, comics, and more!—from historical newspapers dating to the 1800s. In this post, Ben discusses his aspirations for engaging the American public with the millions of images he extracted from Chronicling America.
A gallery of historic moustaches, a wall of 12,000 photos, a collage of First World War-era “damn the Kaiser” cartoons, and more were on display May 7, when 135 people attended a virtual “data jam” to dig into a massive new collection of historic newspaper images. LC Labs hosted the event to showcase Library of …
This is an interview with Maria Capecchi, Abigail Tick, and Joshua Ortiz Baco, three of the seven students that joined our team during the summer of 2021. As a small group, they worked together to better understand the Newspaper Navigator data set with the needs of undergraduate students in mind.
Why Machine Learning? Everyone at the Library of Congress wants the materials we steward and the services we offer to be useful for as many people as possible. It’s why we do what we do! And across the Library, staff have long relied on technological innovations to enable people to use our materials to become …
The Library of Congress recently published a series of updates to loc.gov/apis, home to technical documentation for multiple application programming interfaces.
Across the last five years, LC Labs experiments have integrated sundry perspectives and disciplines to connect people, practice, and history; from making collections more legible and discoverable through volunteer crowdsourcing efforts with Beyond Words and By the People, to developing frameworks for ethically engaging people when adopting machine learning with Humans in the Loop, to …
