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chcaa/danish-book-ads

Books and Journals in Danish Newspaper Advertisements (1800–1850) A dataset of extracted and cleaned book titles and author names from Danish newspaper advertisements published between 1800 and 1850. The records were automatically extracted from digitized newspapers using a combination of rule-based methods, named-entity recognition, and a trained category classifier. Dataset Description Summary The dataset contains 80,938 advertisement records… See the full description on the dataset page: https://huggingface.co/datasets/chcaa/danish-book-ads.

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Dataset Card

Books and Journals in Danish Newspaper Advertisements (1800–1850)

A dataset of extracted and cleaned book titles and author names from Danish newspaper advertisements published between 1800 and 1850. The records were automatically extracted from digitized newspapers using a combination of rule-based methods, named-entity recognition, and a trained category classifier.

Dataset Description

Summary

The dataset contains 80,938 advertisement records drawn from nine Danish local newspapers. Each record corresponds to a title advertised in a book announcement: the title and author have been extracted and cleaned from the raw advertisement text, a subject category has been predicted by a TF-IDF logistic regression classifier, and the original advertisement text is included for reference.

Supported Tasks

—Text classification: predict the subject category of a book advertisement
—Information extraction / digital humanities: study the book market, publishing geography, and reading culture in early 19th-century Denmark

Languages

Danish (da). All advertisement texts are in 19th-century Danish orthography.

Dataset Structure

Data Fields

Field	Type	Description
`id`	string	Unique identifier in the format `{newspaper}_{date}_{sequence}`, e.g. `berlingske_1814-12-26_1062388`
`date`	string	Publication date (`YYYY-MM-DD`)
`text`	string	Raw advertisement text as it appears in the newspaper
`title`	string	Extracted book title (may still contain noise)
`clean_title`	string	Cleaned and normalized book title
`author_original`	string	Author string as extracted from the advertisement
`full_name`	string	Reconstructed full author name
`first_name`	string	Author first name
`last_name`	string	Author last name
`category_predicted`	string	Predicted subject category (see below)
`confidence`	string	Classifier confidence score, or `"gold"` (manually verified) / `"author"` (author-name heuristic)
`category`	string	Original advertisement type: `book`, `journal`, or `almanac_calendar`
`subscription`	string	Subscription or pre-order information, if present
`sender`	string	Sender or advertiser information, if present
`nr`	string	Internal sequence number within the source file
`check`	string	Manual annotation flag used during dataset construction

Predicted Categories

The category_predicted field uses the following labels:

Label	Description
`Agriculture, household and practical arts`	Agricultural, domestic, and practical manuals
`Almanacs and other light readings`	Almanacs, calendars
`Education and Bildung`	Textbooks, educational and pedagogical works
`History, geography and philosophy`	History, geography, travel, and philosophy
`Law, politics and public affairs`	Legal, governmental, and political texts
`Literature and personal writings`	Poetry, fiction, essays, and belles-lettres
`Music`	Sheet music and music theory
`Religion, theology and psalms`	Theology, sermons, devotional literature, and hymnals
`Theatre`	Theatre programmes and play scripts
`Unknown`	Could not be classified with sufficient confidence, neither manually

Data Splits

The dataset is released as a single train split containing all 80,938 records.

Data Collection and Processing

Source Newspapers

Records were extracted from the following digitized newspapers, accessed via the Royal Danish Library's newspaper portal (Mediestream):

Newspaper	Region
Berlingske Tidende	Copenhagen (national)
Aalborg Stiftstidende	Northern Jutland
Aarhuus Stifts-Tidende	Central Jutland
Lolland-Falsters Stifts-Tidende	Southern islands
Odense Adresse-Contoirs Efterretninger	Funen
Ribe Stifts Adresseaviser	South-western Jutland
Den Vest-Sjællandske Avis	Western Zealand
Den Nord-Cimbriske Tilskuer	Northern Jutland
Viborger Samler	Central Jutland

Citation

If you use this dataset, please cite:

bibtex

@dataset{danish_book_ads_2026,
  author    = {Lassche, Alie, Rie Eriksen, Pascale Feldkamp, Katrine Baunvig and Kristoffer Nielbo},
  title     = {Books and Journals in Danish Newspaper Advertisements, 1800--1850},
  year      = {2026},
  publisher = {Hugging Face},
  url       = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/chcaa/danish-book-ads}
}

License

This dataset is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.

Contact

For questions about the dataset, contact Alie Lassche.