dell-research-harvard/AmericanStories

American Stories offers high-quality structured data from historical newspapers suitable for pre-training large language models to enhance the understanding of historical English and world knowledge. It can also be integrated into external databases of retrieval-augmented language models, enabling broader access to historical information, including interpretations of political events and intricate details about people's ancestors. Additionally, the structured article texts facilitate the application of transformer-based methods for popular tasks like detecting reproduced content, significantly improving accuracy compared to traditional OCR methods. American Stories serves as a substantial and valuable dataset for advancing multimodal layout analysis models and other multimodal applications.