Elamur Research⌕
☰
home / papers / 2026 / Towards an interoperable Hungarian historical newspaper corpus

Towards an interoperable Hungarian historical newspaper corpus

Paper · 2026 · Noémi Ligeti-Nagy and Henrietta Szabó

Summary

Hungarian newspapers from about 1800–1920 have been digitised extensively, but the material is spread across many portals with inconsistent metadata, access routes and OCR quality. None of these collections forms an interoperable corpus. This extended abstract reports progress on the Hungarian part of PressMint, a CLARIN effort to build comparable multilingual historical newspaper corpora in a shared TEI format.

The authors keep source selection apart from processing. Selection is managed through a living inventory of over 150 candidate records with a fixed schema. Processing is handled by the pressmint-hu repository, which checks the inventory against controlled vocabularies through CI, derives deterministic identifiers and generates TEI headers from YAML.

Source scouting covered Europeana, Hungaricana, OSZK–EPA, DiFMOE, ANNO, Arcanum and other portals. The paper also outlines a four-stage pipeline: image normalisation, layout analysis, region-level OCR and TEI conversion with facsimile linkage. An OCR/layout evaluation is planned but not yet reported. The work provides a transparent, rebuildable basis for a first Hungarian release candidate in 2026, which will enable regional and cross-border press comparison.

Key points

  • Europeana and OSZK–EPA: API harvesting from Europeana returned 69,290 Hungarian-language text items, usable only for discovery because its newspaper filter proved unreliable. A manual survey of OSZK–EPA found at least 142 regional, 54 cross-border and 50 newspaper collections, with overlaps not yet resolved.
  • DiFMOE: Eight Hungarian-language periodicals were added to the inventory, and seven of them fall inside the PressMint time window.
  • Hungaricana pilot: A curated manual-download list holds 12 titles, with target periods mostly capped at 1915. Some titles are narrower, e.g. Szatmári Értesítő covers only 1862 and Felsőmagyarországi Hírlap covers 1903–1907.
  • Planned evaluation: Using manually corrected pages, the authors will test OCR applied to whole pages as a baseline against a pipeline that first analyses page layout. Measures include character and word error rates, column and reading-order preservation, and Hungarian-specific errors such as diacritics and hyphenation. Linguistic annotations are to be stored as stand-off layers.
  • 2026 deliverables:
    • a cleaned Europeana-derived candidate list;
    • a TEI pilot release covering the 7 DiFMOE titles and part of the Hungaricana list;
    • an OCR/layout benchmark;
    • a YAML→TEI toolchain integrated into repository validation.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Eötvös Loránd UniversityBudapest · Hungary5 works · 256 citations🔬ELTE Research Centre for LinguisticsBudapest · Hungary2 works

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 6The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 16,667 worksArtificial Intelligence · 16,194 worksArts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksLiterature and Literary Theory · 519 worksConservation · 7 works

Cite

Cite as Noémi Ligeti-Nagy and Henrietta Szabó. 2026. Towards an interoperable Hungarian historical newspaper corpus. Proceedings of the First Workshop on Creating Interoperable Corpora of Historical Newspapers.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.63317/33jwhn35vqjk

@inproceedings{ligetinagy2026interoperable,
  title = {{Towards an interoperable Hungarian historical newspaper corpus}},
  author = {Noémi Ligeti-Nagy and Henrietta Szabó},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the First Workshop on Creating Interoperable Corpora of Historical Newspapers},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.63317/33jwhn35vqjk},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/33jwhn35vqjk}
}

References

10 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Nuno Freire, Antoine Isaac, Twan Goosen, Daan Broeder, Hugo Manguinhas, and Valentine Charles. 2019. Opening Digitized Newspapers Corpora: Europeana’s Full-Text Data Interoperability Case. In 2nd Conference on Language, Data and Knowledge (LDK 2019), volume 70 of Open Access Series in Informatics (O… find
  2. Hungaricana. n.d. Library \| hungaricana. https://library.hungaricana.hu/en/. Accessed: 2026-03-30. ↗
  3. Kimmo Kettunen, Heikki Keskustalo, Sanna Kumpulainen, Tuula Pääkkönen, and Juha Rautiainen. 2022. OCR quality affects perceived usefulness of historical newspaper clippings – a user study. arXiv:2203.03557. — [arXiv:2203.03557](https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.03557) find
  4. Günter Mühlberger. 2014. METS/ALTO Profile (EN-MAP) – Deliverable D5.2 (Draft). Technical report, Europeana Newspapers Project. Accessed 2026-03-03. find
  5. Christa Müller. 2004. A N N O – Austrian Newspapers Online: Historische österreichische Zeitungen und Zeitschriften online. Eine Digital-isierungsinitiative der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek. In Hartmut Walravens, editor, Newspapers in Central and Eastern Europe / Zeitungen in Mittel- und Oste… find
  6. Clemens Neudecker and Apostolos Antonacopoulos. 2016. find
  7. Making Europe’s Historical Newspapers Searchable. In 2016 12th IAPR Workshop on Document Analysis Systems (DAS), pages 405–410, Santorini, Greece. IEEE. find
  8. Országos Széchényi Könyvtár (OSZK). 2026. EPA – Elektronikus Periodika Archívum. https://epa.oszk.hu/. Accessed 2026-03-03. ↗
  9. David A. Smith and Ryan Cordell. 2018. A Research Agenda for Historical and Multilingual Optical Character Recognition. Technical report, Northeastern University, NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks. Accessed 2026-03-03. find
  10. Marieke Willems and Rossitza Atanassova. 2015. Europeana Newspapers: searching digitized historical newspapers from 23 European countries. Insights, 28(1):34–39. find

Updated

↑ back to top

This page in Markdown → https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/nagy-2026-interoperable-hungarian-historical-newspaper-corpus/