Background and history

Compilation of English newspapers of the late 17th and 18th centuries began as a small project in the early 1990s with several groups of seminar students who were prepared to key in the relevant texts, as it had proved impossible to automatically scan the early newspapers. Two study trips were conducted by Udo Fries to select and photocopy newspapers from the microfilmed version of the Early English Newspaper Collection (The Burney Collection) at the British Library, London. With very little funding available, Udo Fries, his assistant, and staff of the English department carried on keying in texts over the next years.

The aim was from the beginning to provide users with a machine-readable collection of early English newspapers texts for studies of the genre and more general studies of 18th century English. It has been our aim to produce as representative a corpus as possible. To achieve this we have included a wide variety of newspapers selected in regular intervals of the whole period, and covering most of the text-classes available. Peter Schneider, Hans Martin Lehmann and Beni Ruef were responsible for creating the machine-readable version, including links to the graphically scanned pages of all the newspaper issues (available in the on-line version only).

Since the material of the 17th century was sparse compared to the later decades, we decided to fill those gaps. The new material was collected by Patrick Studer and keyed in and added to the existing collection.