Music in newspapers: Interdisciplinary opportunities and data-related challenges

Over the past millennia, music has actively been performed and listened to by mankind, thus also playing an important role in establishing sociocultural identities that have evolved over time. In parallel, for many centuries, newspapers played an important role in informing society on a regular and frequent basis on topics noteworthy at that time. Therefore, in retrospect, these newspapers offer windows into historic topics of sociocultural significance, including cultural and musical life. Thanks to ongoing digitization efforts, large-scale newspaper corpora now have become broadly available and accessible. Taking the digitized historical newspaper collection of the National Library of The Netherlands as an example, in this paper, we discuss how considering music-related mentionings in newspapers can enable potential new research directions and questions. We discuss open syntactic and semantic data-related technical challenges when analyzing music-related mentionings in digitized historical newspaper collections. Finally, we discuss how successful detection of music-related mentionings can also benefit engagement of non-scholarly end users, concluding with an invitation to the interdisciplinary research community to actively contribute to the given use case.