dLOC as Data, an initiative of the Digital Library of the Caribbean, intends to enhance access to its existing Caribbean newspaper collections by making texts available for bulk download to its users. This will facilitate modes of scholarship that depend on access to image and textual data at scale and will enable a new level of access to titles not included in newspaper data resources such as Chronicling America. To meet the needs of the dLOC community for teaching and research, we will demonstrate the potential of newspaper data by creating a pilot thematic tool kit focused on hurricanes and tropical cyclones. The toolkit will provide multilingual datasets focused on these disasters from several countries and islands in the Caribbean, such as the Bahamas, Belize, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Haiti, Jamaica, and Martinique. The dataset collection from these newspapers have coverage from different periods of time and can provide scholars with insights into Caribbean culture and society as well as the role of resiliency within disasters.
dLOC as Data is supported by Collections as Data: Part to Whole, an initiative funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
