The US Library of Congress has launched a new AI tool that lets you explore more than 1.5 million historical newspaper images online and free of charge.

Called Newspaper Navigator, the tool is the brainchild of Ben Lee, a Washington University researcher and also an Innovator-in-Residence at the Library of Congress.

It enables users to search visual content in American newspapers dating 1789-1963. When the user enters a keyword, a selection of photos appears from which he/she can choose photos to search against. This, in turn, allows the discovery of related images that were previously undetectable by search engines.

To create Newspaper Navigator, Lee trained computer algorithms to sort through 16 million Chronicling America newspaper pages in search of photographs, illustrations, maps, cartoons, comics, headlines and advertisements.

The idea for Lee’s project began with a Library crowdsourcing experiment by 2017 Innovator in Residence Tong Wang called Beyond Words. It invited members of the public to help identify cartoons, illustrations, photographs and advertisements in World War I-era newspapers. Users could draw boxes around visual content on a page, transcribe captions or review other users’ transcriptions.

“When I first encountered Beyond Words, I was captivated by the thousands of photographs, illustrations, cartoons and maps identified by volunteers. I began to wonder whether this identified visual content was the key to throwing open the treasure chest of visual content throughout all 16 million pages in Chronicling America using machine learning,” Lee said.

He later applied to the Library’s Innovator in Residence Program to find out.

All code used in the project is open source. The dataset code can be accessed here.