The Old Joke Archive

Jokes represent one of the most understudied sources about nineteenth century society. Due to their ephemeral nature they slipped from attention as soon as they were no longer funny or topical. Digitisation of newspapers and books has made them available again, but due to their short nature they are not easily accessible through current generic keyword-based newspaper search systems.

The Old Joke Archive will use a combination of automation and crowdsourcing to extract jokes from newspapers and books, transcribe the text, classify, and then annotate them. The resulting archive will be made available freely for both academics and the general public.

Web-site:

Launch August 2021

Source-code:

To be released

Publications:

A Humorous View into the Past: The Old Jokes Archive.