North Carolina Historic Newspapers

The weekly sentinel. volume (Winston-Salem, N.C.), 06 May 1886. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress.

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The North Carolina Collection in Wilson Library has long been a leader in documenting the state’s history through written works, photographs, and artifacts that span centuries. In 2012, the North Carolina Historic Newspapers Project received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. That support presented an opportunity to provide the public with easier access to a portion of their collection through digitization.

But they weren’t going to stop there! Realizing a geographic view of the newspapers would be interesting to researchers, the North Carolina Collection sought help from the Research Hub to develop a map that would show the distribution of papers across the state. A Data Visualization Librarian assisted in creating the map using an interactive data viz tool called Tableau.

The map allows users to filter newspapers by city, preview a thumbnail of each paper, and access the digitized version on the Library of Congress’s “Chronicling America” site. With this new tool at their disposal, those interested in North Carolina’s history can now peruse a century-old newspaper from the comfort of their own home.