From Newspaper Images to Searchable Text:
Building a North-China Herald Corpus of War and Diplomacy
從報紙影像到可檢索文本：十九世紀上海英文報刊戰爭與外交社論語料庫的建置與研究價值
An academic introduction to a proposed corpus of North-China Herald leading articles on war, treaty revision, diplomatic negotiation and the treaty-port commercial order, with a traceable workflow from page images and column boundaries to semi-diplomatic transcription, metadata and discourse analysis.
An academic introduction to a proposed corpus of North-China Herald leading articles on war, treaty revision, diplomatic negotiation and the treaty-port commercial order, with a traceable workflow from page images and column boundaries to semi-diplomatic transcription, metadata and discourse analysis.
Editorial Abstract
This article introduces a proposed historical newspaper corpus centred on the North-China Herald's leading articles concerning war in China, treaty revision, diplomatic negotiation and the commercial order of the treaty ports. The project treats corpus building as a continuous scholarly workflow: source-image identification, page and column location, article-boundary reconstruction, semi-diplomatic transcription, metadata creation, thematic annotation and discourse analysis.
The corpus is designed to preserve the relationship between text and evidence. Each transcription will remain traceable to a dated issue, printed page, digital sequence, column position and source image. Organised chronologically, the material can show how Shanghai's English-language press interpreted uncertain news and connected military pressure, commercial interest and diplomatic legitimacy. The resulting infrastructure can support research in the history of the Second Opium War, treaty revision, treaty-port journalism, political vocabulary and digital humanities.