Description
This project aims to use a machine learning pipeline to trace the spread of two competing historical facts, through nineteenth-century Dutch newspaper articles. A supervised approach is used to find the relevant newspaper articles, and be able to use the categorization of these articles to perform further analysis. The project forms part of the NWO-funded project ‘Pretenders for the Printing Press: A New Conception of Historical Facts’, which seeks to answer the question how historical facts actually come into being and how they disappear. The case study in this project is the dispute over who was the inventor of printing with movable type. This dispute was particularly fierce throughout the nineteenth century with two main contenders for the title of inventor: Johannes Gutenberg from Mainz and Laurens Janszoon Coster from Haarlem.