The Pleasures and Perils of Big Data in Digitized Newspapers

This essay enumerates some of the pleasures and perils of doing research on 1910s US cinema in digitized newspapers. The pleasures include working at one's home or office computer rather than taking lengthy trips to city and state libraries and, more important, discovering a wealth of unexpected documents that can change the direction of one's analysis or argument. The perils, however, are many: different newspaper databases can be very uneven in what they choose to digitize (and their principles inexplicable), their keyword searches can be unreliable and inconsistent, and their virtuality eliminates the community of librarians, archivists, and other researchers with whom one can confer at an actual site.