The massive digitization efforts related to historical newspapers over the past decades have focused on mass media sources and ordinary people as their primary recipients. Much less attention has been paid to newspapers published for a more specialized audience, e.g., those aiming at scholarly or cultural exchange within intellectual communities much narrower in scope, such as newspapers devoted to music criticism, arts or philosophy. Only some few of these specialized newspapers have been digitized up until now, but they are usually not well curated in terms of digitization quality, data formatting, completeness, redundancy (de-duplication), supply of metadata, and, hence, searchability. This paper describes our approach to eliminate these drawbacks for a major German-language newspaper resource of the Romantic Age, the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung (General Music Gazette). We here focus on a workflow that copes with a posteriori digitization problems, inconsistent OCRing and index building for searchability. In addition, we provide a user-friendly graphic interface to empower content-centric access to this (and other) digital resource(s) adopting open-source software for the purpose of Web presentation.

The stability of word embedding algorithms, i.e., the consistency of the word representations they reveal when trained repeatedly on the same data set, has recently raised concerns. We here compare word embedding algorithms on three corpora of different sizes, and evaluate both their stability and accuracy. We find strong evidence that down-sampling strategies (used as part of their training procedures) are particularly influential for the stability of SVD-PPMI-type embeddings. This finding seems to explain diverging reports on their stability and lead us to a simple modification which provides superior stability as well as accuracy on par with skip-gram embedding