[Ads-l] Databases for Historical U.S. Searching

[Bill Mullins]

>  If anyone knows of specific state projects that have a lot of material not included in Chronicling America, I would love to hear about them.

The California
https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=p&p=home
database currently has 8.6 million pages, which is more than Chronicling America did when I first started using it (it has 19.7 million pages now). It's big enough that I'd duplicate Chronicling America searches there.

I'd check the state databases when there's some regional aspect associated with a term that makes it worth doing so (like Ben Zimmer's "maverick" Texas connection, or checking the Kentucky one for "bluegrass", etc.)

I have my doubts that the search engine at Chronicling America is very good.  This page
https://idnc.library.illinois.edu/?a=p&p=collections&cltn=IDNC&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN--------
says that Chronicling America's Illinois collection consists of the listed papers.  You can do a search of all of them here ("Limit Search by Collection" to "Illinois Newspapers").  If I do that limited search for "Harry Houdini", and do the same search at Chronicling America, also limited to Illinois, I get different but overlapping results, with the Illinois page providing a number of articles that Chronicling America misses. OTOH, Chronicling America provides a couple that the Illinois page misses.  But the Illinois page does way better.  Chronicling America returns only 10 Illinois hits for "Harry Houdini", which on its own is ridiculous -- the most popular entertainer in America of the era mentioned only on 10 pages for the state of Illinois?

Some time ago I went and found everything I could on the internet about a Montana mining engineer named Wilbur Edgerton Sanders, from the 1890s on.  As a mining engineer, he travelled and prospected all over the Western United States.  Not only did I search Chronicling America, but also the state databases for Montana, Washington, Arizona, California, Oregon, Colorado, etc.  And in just about every state I found significantly more items in the state sites that Chronicling America had not revealed.

________________________________
From: Shapiro, Fred <fred.shapiro at yale.edu>
Sent: Friday, July 1, 2022 3:11 PM
To: Bill Mullins <amcombill at hotmail.com>; American Dialect Society <ads-l at listserv.uga.edu>; b.taylorblake at GMAIL.COM <b.taylorblake at GMAIL.COM>
Subject: Re: Databases for Historical U.S. Searching

Well, it's distressing to learn that I was wrong about Chronicling America aggregating all the individual state newspaper projects.  This means (1) I have been missing things when I thought I was being comprehensive; and (2) Since i clearly don't want to do 50 additional searches, I will be missing some things in the future.

If anyone knows of specific state projects that have a lot of material not included in Chronicling America, I would love to hear about them.

Fred Shapiro



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