Study title

13 semi-structured interviews were conducted with librarians, archivists and digital content managers who work in in public institutions and commercial companies in Europe, North America and Australasia. Interviews were conducted between February and December 2018 in accordance with ethics procedures at Loughborough University (29 January 2018) and University College London (21st May 2018). After interviews were completed a transcript was written up and interviewees were invited to comment on or submit corrections to the transcripts. We then analysed the interviews according to an inductive, thematic approach. The transcribed interviews were destroyed in line with ethics requirements.Newspapers were the first big data for a mass audience. Their dramatic expansion over the nineteenth century created a global culture of abundant, rapidly circulating information. The significance of the newspaper, however, has largely been defined in metropolitan and national terms in scholarship of the period. The collecting and digitization by local institutions further situated newspapers within a national context. "Oceanic Exchanges: Tracing Global Information Networks in Historical Newspaper Repositories, 1840-1914" (OcEx) brings together leading efforts in computational periodicals research from the US, Mexico, Germany, the Netherlands, Finland and the UK to examine patterns of information flow across national and linguistic boundaries in nineteenth century newspapers by linking digitized newspaper corpora currently siloed in national collections. OcEx seeks to break through the conceptual, institutional, and political barriers which have limited working with big humanities data by bringing together historical newspaper experts from different countries and disciplines around common questions; by actively crossing the national boundaries that have previously separated digitized newspaper corpora through computational analysis; and by illustrating the global connectedness of...