Collecting Reports

Newspapers around the world formatted news articles very differently, and digitization technologies have a variety of approaches to article segmentation. Together, these factors raise a big question: what is a news article? The Wilde Trials International News Archive has developed some criteria for determining what constitutes a news article (commonly called reports in the project) and what gets transcribed as an individual file.

Collect all relevant articles on the Wilde trials and aftermath between April 1 1895 to Dec 31 1895. When browsing a newspaper for articles, make sure to examine each issue printed within the period. When searching a newspaper database for articles, use the search term “Oscar Wilde.” Then try “Wilde,” “Queensberry,” and “Lord Alfred Douglas” to see if these terms catch more results.

To determine what constitutes an article, prioritize evidence from the newspaper over the database’s article segmentation. In other words, does the newspaper represent it as an individual article? (eg. Does it have a headline; is it separated from other articles?). In most cases, it should be easy to figure out what is an individual news article.

If there are a few different news articles published on the same day which appear in different parts of the newspaper, each of these news articles is considered distinctive and gets transcribed as an individual file.

If there is one long column, with multiple news items, including items pertaining to the Wilde trials, transcribe the relevant news items, while omitting the non-relevant news items. Use p class='omitted'></p to indicate if there is text that you have excerpted in the middle of the selected news article.

In cases where there are two articles that appear one after the other, some judgement call will be needed. If a significant headline or large dividing feature separates the two items, treat them as separate articles and transcribe each in its own individual file.

Do not collect articles that make only minor reference to Wilde and are not directly related to the trials and his imprisonment.

For headlines, make sure to include the title of the column (if there is one) as well as the article headline and sub-headlines.

Collect illustrations of Wilde, the trials, and his imprisonment from the relevant newspaper articles for inclusion in the archive's Image Gallery.

For Australian newspapers in the Trove database, use the custom-built Trove tool to collect articles. http://www.sfu.ca/~mjoyce/wt/. Copy and paste the marked up text into a new file in Oxygen for editing.

For American newspapers in the Chronicling America database, use the CA tool to collect articles. http://www.sfu.ca/~mjoyce/wt/ca.html. Copy and paste the marked up text into a new file in Oxygen for editing.

Contact the PI, developers, or DHIL for the correct API keys.