About Newspaper Inspector
Newspaper Inspector searches the newspapers in the Library of Congress' Chronicling America collection and returns word clouds related to the words you searched.
Newspaper Inspector was created as part of Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers Data Challenge.
What are word clouds?
Word clouds show how many times a word was used in a piece of writing. Words that were used a lot are shown as big and dark, while words that were used less often are small and lighter in color. In Newspaper Inspector, the word clouds show the words that appeared most often on the same page as the word that you searched for.
Why does Newspaper Inspector show more than one word cloud for my search?
Sometimes the way newspapers write about a topic changes over time, or varies by the region or audience of the newspaper. To help you explore these differences, Newspaper Inspector divides the papers in Chronicling America three different ways:
- By time period
- By region, using the U.S. Census Regions
- By the race of the newspaper's audience. The African-American word cloud includes the 51 papers in the collection the Library of Congress identifies as African American. For comparison, the second cloud in this section shows results from all newspapers in the collection.
Are there any details I should know about how Newspaper Inspector picks the words in each cloud?
Words of two letters or less and very commons words are not included in the word clouds. Also, in order to keep searches reasonably fast, Newspaper Inspector looks at the first twenty page results to create each cloud.