This paper presents the methodologies to extract the headline and illustrations from a historical newspaper for storytelling to support digital scholarship. It explored the ways in which new digital tools can facilitate the understanding of the newspaper content in the setting of time and space, "The Hongkong News" was selected from Hong Kong Early Tabloid Newspaper for the case study owing to its uniqueness in historical value towards the scholars. The proposed methodologies were evaluated in OCR (Optical Character Recognition) with scraping and Deep Learning Object Detection models. Two visualization products were developed to showcase the feasibility of our proposed methods to serve the storytelling purpose.
The past year of off-site telework allowed Preservation Research and Testing Division (PRTD) staff to do a deep dive into serious considerations about data analytics and data visualizations. Much of this work related to utilizing the tools we had available, linking the visualizations to data analytics for cultural heritage and heritage science research projects, with a strong focus on how best to adapt visualizations for specific audiences, ranging from scientific colleagues, conservation and collection care, interested public, and personnel wanting to use the information for a range of decision-making functions. Some of the factors we assessed related to the amount of information or data presented, whether to present minimal data with hover-over functionality to encourage exploration or allow different views for different audiences, what was “too much” data, what programs people were familiar with and the types of presentations, graphs, scatterplots, bar-charts, interactives etc. Significant discussions and reworking of visualizations answered some questions, while exposing many more.