Can you describe your project in three sentences and explain the digital component of your work?
In the 19th century, newspapers copied each other extensively: Texts were reprinted, adapted, and circulated across regional and national borders. Migration and HERitage: Gender Mining the Nineteenth-Century German-American Press examines this phenomenon using the example of the German-American press, the largest non-English-language press in the 19th century US press environment. My special focus is on the role of women within transregional networks of news production, circulation, and exchange. Using computer-assisted methods to identify reprints in digital newspaper archives and combining quantitative analyses with close readings, the project shows that women were visible as recipients, producers, and actors in the press well before the invention of women’s pages in the 1890s.

Example of an article providing advice on child nutrition that went viral and was reprinted repeatedly in various German-American newspapers over the course of decades during the summer months. “For the attention of mothers,” Local section, Freie Presse für Texas, San Antonio, Texas, June 16, 1880, Chronicling America, https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83045227/1880-06-16/ed-1/?sp=4&st=image
Added value: What was only possible or what advantages did you have because you worked digitally?
Only the combination of digitized newspapers and automated text reuse detection made it possible to identify several thousand texts that had been reprinted and redistributed across time, place, and individual newspapers. Also, only the exploratory work with the clustered data set allowed me to highlight the extension and diversity of texts by, about, and for women. Articles covering debates on women’s suffrage, advertisements on women’s health, advice on children’s nutrition from a female perspective, as well as short stories and humorous texts about being a woman stood out. All of these texts circulated within the German-American press, where they provided the basis for commentary and were contextualized.
Had you worked with digital methods before?
Before starting the project, I had only worked with digital methods to a very limited extent and had taught myself most of the methodological tools. During my master’s degree, I had only taken one course on digital humanities, which dealt with so-called captivity narratives. These are early modern and early modern narratives about prisoners of European descent (often women) in indigenous communities in North America. In my term paper, I experimented with Voyant as an introductory tool for the first time. Voyant allowed me to investigate whether and how the representation of indigenous actors changed over the course of the narratives, especially whether language and attributions shifted with increasing duration of captivity, and towards the end of the narratives.

Image 3 [Distribution of word clusters throughout the plot (including “heathen,” “creature,” “devil,” ‘Indians’), created with Voyant for the term paper “Language as Propagandistic Ploy: Stigmatization of Native Americans via Terminology”]
What triggered your decision to embark on a digital project?
Quite frankly, it was the result of a very particular opportunity: as a doctoral researcher at the University of Stuttgart, I had the privilege of beginning my academic career within the international Digital Humanities consortium “Oceanic Exchanges: Tracing Global Information Networks in Historic Newspaper Repositories, 1840–1914” (DFG). The project brought together scholars from the United States, Mexico, Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, and the United Kingdom who work in computational periodicals and press research. In Stuttgart, I was able to collaborate closely with the Institute for Natural Language Processing as well as the Institute for Visualization and Interactive Systems. What fascinated me most was the teamwork. Looking back, I would say that I did not so much leap into the digital as into the interdisciplinary—and today, I can hardly imagine working any other way.
Digital projects are known for a steep learning curve. What are five tips you would like to give to your younger self? What do you wish you had known, what would you have done differently, what turned out to be eye-opening for you?
1. Accept that you are working in more than one discipline—and that you can never be “up to date” in everything. Looking back, I wish I had told myself earlier that the feeling of constantly missing something is part of interdisciplinary work. Not being equally proficient in all fields is not a deficit, but part of the position between history, digital history, and computer science.
2. Learn how to translate—not only between languages, but between disciplinary cultures. At the beginning, I spoke very technically about my work and only realized later that many of my non-DH colleagues simply couldn’t follow me. It would have helped me to understand earlier that good digital history also consists of explaining methods in an understandable way without trivializing them.
3. Explore your data systematically, not just based on hypotheses. It was truly eye-opening to see how much became visible through exploratory work, especially after clustering the texts using text reuse detection. Digital methods not only provide answers to existing questions, but also generate new questions that would not have arisen without these procedures.
4. Document decisions consistently (even the wrong ones). I would have liked to have told my younger self earlier on how important it is to continuously record methodological decisions, parameters, and detours. This documentation is not only important for transparency, but also for writing, arguing, and reflecting on one’s own research later.
5. Take advantage of the opportunity to present early results—but be aware of the explanatory mode. A major advantage of digital history is that interim results can be presented and discussed at an early stage. At the same time, DH researchers are often expected to talk much more about methods than about historical results, which means that they are more often in explanatory mode than in actual substantive discussion.
6. And I have one more! Don’t constantly justify yourself. Digital history is here to stay. When I started out, I often had to explain why I was working digitally in the first place. These demands for justification have disappeared over time. Looking back, I wish I had trusted that digital methods would be relevant and prevail in the long term from the beginning.

Jana Dunz-Keck is a Research Fellow for History of the Americas/Transatlantic History at the German Historical Institute Washington, where she coordinates the Digital History research area. In her current project, When Climate Hits Home: Internal Migration and Mobility in the U.S. during the Age of the Great Acceleration, she examines the history of climate-induced relocation in the United States since the 1980s using digital mapping and archival research. Her work combines digital history with media and migration history. Migration and HERitage will be published soon in De Gruyter Brill’s Studies in Digital History and Hermeneutics series.
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9416-1256
The blog series „Hätte ich das mal eher gewusst … Was Historiker:innen und historisch arbeitende ihrem jüngeren Ich raten würden“ [“If only I had known that sooner… What historians and those working in history would advise their younger selves”] is supervised by the GHI Washington in cooperation with NFDI4Memory / Task Area Data Culture and Task Area Data Literacy, the Association of German Historians (VHD), and the Digital History Chair at Humboldt University in Berlin. We welcome anyone who would like to discuss their experiences with digital projects in the field of history—and shares tips on what they would definitely do differently next time.
Are you interested in writing a contribution for the series? We’d love to hear from you! Christiane Weber (VHD/NFDI4Memory) [weber@historikerverband.de] and Katharina Hering (GHI) [hering@ghi-dc.org] look forward to hearing from you!
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