by Fil This new fascinating dataset just dropped on Hugging Face : [French public domain newspapers](https://huggingface.co/datasets/PleIAs/French-PD-Newspapers) 🤗 references about **3 million newspapers and periodicals** with their full text OCR’ed and some meta-data. The data is stored in 320 large parquet files. The data loader for this [Observable framework](https://observablehq.com/framework) project uses [DuckDB](https://duckdb.org/) to read these files (altogether about 200GB) and combines a minimal subset of their metadata — title and year of publication, most importantly without the text contents —, into a single highly optimized parquet file. This takes only about 1 minute to run in a hugging-face Space. The resulting file is small enough (about 8MB) that we can load it in the browser and create “live” charts with [Observable Plot](https://observablehq.com/plot). In this project, I’m exploring two aspects of the dataset: - As I played with the titles, I saw that the word “gazette” was quite frequent in the 17th Century. An exploration of the words used in the titles is on the page [gazette](gazette). - A lot of publications stopped or started publishing during the second world war. Explored in [resistance](resistance). This page summarizes the time distribution of the data: ```js echo import { DuckDBClient } from "npm:@observablehq/duckdb"; const db = DuckDBClient.of({ presse: FileAttachment("data/presse.parquet") }); ``` ```js echo const dates = db.query("SELECT year FROM presse WHERE year >= '1000'"); ``` _Note: due to the date pattern matching I’m using, unknown years are marked as 0000. Hence the filter above._ The chart below indicates that the bulk of the contents collected in this database was published between 1850 and 1950. It’s obviously not that the _presse_ stopped after 1950, but because most of the printed world after that threshold year is still out of reach of researchers, as it is “protected” by copyright or _droit d’auteur._ ${Plot.rectY(dates, Plot.binX({ y: "count" }, { x: "year", interval: "5 years" })).plot({ marginLeft: 60 })} ```js echo run=false Plot.plot({ marks: [ Plot.rectY( dates, Plot.binX({ y: "count" }, { x: "year", interval: "5 years" }) ), ], }); ```