This chapter analyses current technologies and the challenges involved in extracting and classifying articles and news headlines from historical journals, as well as converting images to text format. The work to develop a tool focused on digitising historical journals was carried out by a multidisciplinary team of experts in media studies, artificial intelligence, image processing, and cultural heritage preservation. The data used derives from two historic Portuguese journals, Diário de Notícias and Jornal de Notícias, which were created in the mid-19th century. This project is based on a mixture of heuristics, computer vision, pattern recognition, and other artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques. The main challenges included the variability in the design of historical journals, preserving the quality of images over time, and continuously improving image processing and OCR techniques to adapt to different styles and periods of newspapers.

This research was supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia) [2023.04877.BD].

Industry 4.0,News media,Historical newspapers,Journals,Digitization,Innovation,Content creation,Artificial intelligence,Machine learning,Optical Character Recognition,Convolutional Neural Networks,Natural language processing,Historascan,Diário de Notícias,Jornal de Notícias

This publication is an output of the following project(s):

• Aversion2agony: Uma análise comparativa transnacional da mediação jornalística da eutanásia em Portugal e no Reino Unido