Tuesday's Tip - Check Out the Stanford Newspaper Data Visualization website

This week's Tuesday's Tip is to find newspaper holdings using the Stanford University Newspaper Data Visualization website.

During Lisa Louise Cooke's seminar two Saturdays ago, she highlighted the Stanford Newspaper Data Visualization website (http://stanford.edu/group/ruralwest/cgi-bin/drupal/visualizations/us_newspapers) as a place to see the spread of newspapers across the United States, and to determine which newspapers were published in a specific time period.

Here is the home page of the Stanford Newspaper Data Visualization website:

There is a timeline across the top of the screen - it is initially set at 1690.

At the bottom of the "Introduction" screen is a link to "View the Map."  clicking on this hides the introduction and shows the map for 1690.  The map takes a long time to load the first time you click on that.  The map for 1690 has only one dot - for Boston, Massachusetts.

Here's the map for 1774:

I ran my mouse over the dot for Philadelphia and the place name appeared.

Here's the map for 1833 - you can really see the western migration to the Mississippi River and beyond:

The map for the 1890s.  I ran my mouse over a circle for the San Diego area:

Note the large orange circle in Chicago - the language filter is in the lower right-hand corner of the image above.  The orange indicates German language newspapers.

I clicked on the circle for National City, California (my home town) and saw the short list of newspapers in the bottom panel:

When I clicked on the name of the newspaper, the National City Record (1882-1898), a page on the Chronicling America website opened and described this newspaper:

There is a link for "Libraries That Have It" on the screen above, and when I clicked that, the list of repositories with some or all of the issues of the newspaper was provided:

The map was what drew my interest, of course, but the useful feature is the Chronicling America list of repositories that hold this particular newspaper.  Only one repository has the full run of this newspaper, the National City public library has it on microfilm.  I have used it to search for my Carringer families in the San Diego area.

I found that it is sometimes difficult to isolate one city or town on the map when the large circles overlap the small circles.  for instance, I could not make San Diego appear on the map for the 1890s, but several small towns did appear.

On the Chronicling America website, the researcher can input a place name on the "US Newspaper Directory, 1690-present" page (http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/search/titles/) and see all of the newspaper titles for a specific location.

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Copyright (c) 2014, Randall J. Seaver