Family Historian User Group

I have accumulated a very large number of newspaper references for some of my relatives across a wide variety of topics, including court cases, bankruptcies, boxing matches, horse races, exhibitions at agricultural shows, school prizes, drownings, advertisements, etc.

There does not seem to be any consistent method of including these items of information as much of it is narrative, and it's often necessary to provide a substantial amount of text to put the mentions into a proper context. Additionally, there may be a sequence of related articles over a period of time that need to be considered together, and the articles may also be syndicated across several newspapers where it is interesting to spot the errors and omissions that arise as a result.

I had considered creating a seperate database to hold details of the newspapers, dates, people mentioned, images and transcripts, so that I could list all the newspapers an article appeared in, who appeared where and for what reason, etc., but I would prefer to keep all the information together in one place. I've seen a method for using repositories as a database for placenames, and wondered if this might be a way of including my newspaper references, and if so what the implications are when producing narrative reports? This may, of course, be well beyond the scope of the (current) software, but if anyone can help, I'd appreciate any advice.

ID:5949

I would create a source for each newspaper article, attaching the 'image' if you have one to the source. You can then record the 'addtional context' you want in the source notes. You can then put the source against whatever 'facts/attributes' you want for the people, using custom facts/attributes if you want to customise sentances for the naritive reports.

Richard

Furthermore you can record in the Repository Record linked to the Source Record the full contact details of the Newspaper.
Use the same Repository for all articles from the same newspaper.

To save typing, in order to capture a transcript of the text from the newsprint, you could try using OCR (Optical Character Recognition).
This works by scanning the newspaper image (or any other document image) and converting the photo image into word-processor text.
If you have a scanner, or know someone who does, then it will almost certainly have an OCR option.
Alternatively, if you have OneNote as part of Microsoft Office 2007/2010 then it has OCR built in.

I'm already collating the reports in OneNote, it's simply brilliant at allowing you to organise otherwise unstructured data, and I'm using Excel to keep track of what papers/articles I've processed. A seperate table in OneNote holds court case details for individuals detailing which court, if the person appeared as the accused or the defendent, the case outcome, charges or damages  awarded, or prison sentences in some case with hard labour!

The intention is to be able to see who did what, when, and who with, and where it is interesting, the broader context in which the events occurred. Which papers carried the reports can be used roughly to gauge to what extent the event might  be deemed to be of interest to a wider audience. In at least one court case, the outcome led to a change in the law.

OCR from the images - well yes, but I'm generally using the source websites' initial transcriptions where possible, then using Word to get them into readable English! If you've used the new British newspaper archive, you'll know that the quality of the downloaded pages is execrable.

I'm still considering developing a small database application so that the information can be queried in a number of different ways (which I can probably manage reasonably well), and then trying to incorporate that into a web-DVD, but I'm not sure how best to go about that last bit at the moment, hence my question about what potentially could be achieved just using FH.

FH is understandably more focused on relating source material to family events rather than a generalised database.
However, it does have a Query capability, various Report options, and a Web/DVD creation wizard.
Also FH V5 has a new Plugin feature that potentially allows more specialised data management/query/report options.

I suggest you try to identify clearly what you want to achieve, and then explore how FH could support those objectives.
If necessary, create an experimental Project to explore exactly what is possible and what is not.
Examine the FH Help pages, its 'Getting the Most From FH' PDF, and the FHUG Knowledge Base for advice.
If you hit a brick-wall, then post your dilemma here.