(The WNA and) The ANC’s First Newspaper Recovered By Limb How can digital newspapers improve scholarly discovery of sources? In 2012 a team of historians, literary scholars and feminist creative authors combined to recover from obscurity a key early black newspaper, published in five languages from 1912 to 1931, whose seeming disappearance from all repositories scholars had long lamented. In 1948 the communist and botanist Eddie Roux had that it a blot on the South African archives that no file of this paper is to be “is found anywhere in the country”. Les and Donna Switzer, in their magisterial bibliographic survey of the black press, concluded: it was possibly the most ‘Although influential of the black protest journals of this era, virtually no copies have survived’, which meant that its quality be assessed’. Tim Couzens was equally clear: is a ‘cannot ‘It tragedy for South African social history that copies of Abantu Batho exist only for … 1930–31. A crucial link in literary history is certainly missing.’ Elsewhere he laments, absence of a complete picture of its effects on black social and intellectual life is a ‘the major gap in the study of the history of black South African literature’; Abantu-Batho was first really successful black Reef newspaper’; its lost archive is saddest ‘the ‘the gap’, and prevents telling in full early rise of writing activity in Johannesburg’.” ‘the One of the key digital in this book project was the World Newspaper Archive (African a joint project of the Center for Research Libraries and the company Newspapers) Readex, which has placed many such papers online. A second phase will involve an additional 1.5 million PDF pages drawn from the vaults of the British Library and US repositories. In that book I wrote: of the 1970s–80s searched for social histories in newspaper columns, moving ‘Historians on to the cultural sphere. The onset of digital newspaper archives now presents the tool, as John Nerone says, to begin reconstruction of the national conversation of previous ‘the ages’, aided by the distributed nature of the press via the recirculation of content through
(The WNA and) The ANC’s First Newspaper Recovered By Limb How can digital newspapers improve scholarly discovery of sources? In 2012 a team of historians, literary scholars and feminist creative authors combined to recover from obscurity a key early black newspaper, published in five languages from 1912 to 1931, whose seeming disappearance from all repositories scholars had long lamented. In 1948 the communist and botanist Eddie Roux had that it “is a blot on the South African archives that no file of this paper is to be found anywhere in the country”. Les and Donna Switzer, in their magisterial bibliographic survey of the black press, concluded: ‘Although it was possibly the most influential of the black protest journals of this era, virtually no copies have survived’, which meant that its quality ‘cannot be assessed’. Tim Couzens was equally clear: ‘It is a tragedy for South African social history that copies of Abantu Batho … exist only for 1930–31. A crucial link in literary history is certainly missing.’ Elsewhere he laments, ‘the absence of a complete picture of its effects on black social and intellectual life is a major gap in the study of the history of black South African literature’; Abantu-Batho was ‘the first really successful black Reef newspaper’; its lost archive is ‘the saddest gap’, and prevents telling in full ‘the early rise of writing activity in Johannesburg’.” One of the key digital in this book project was the World Newspaper Archive (African Newspapers) a joint project of the Center for Research Libraries and the company Readex, which has placed many such papers online. A second phase will involve an additional 1.5 million PDF pages drawn from the vaults of the British Library and US repositories. In that book I wrote: ‘Historians of the 1970s–80s searched for social histories in newspaper columns, moving on to the cultural sphere. The onset of digital newspaper archives now presents the tool, as John Nerone says, to begin ‘the reconstruction of the national conversation of previous ages’, aided by the distributed nature of the press via the recirculation of content through
attachment-0003.docx