Newspapers collect information about cultural, political and social events in a more detailed way than any other public record. Since their beginnings in the 17th century they are recording billions of events, stories and names, in almost every language, every country and every day. Newspapers were always an important medium for the dissemination of public and political opinions, literary works, essays and art. This thematic wealth sets them at the center stage for anyone interested in European cultural heritage. In the last decades, tens of millions of newspaper pages from European libraries have been digitized and made available online, while national libraries will intensify their digitization efforts in the coming years. There is large demand for access to historical newspapers. At this very moment, probably thousands of European citizens are accessing digitized versions of historical newspapers utilizing digital library services. Whilst the broad public shows general interest in this historical and cultural resource, it is of crucial importance for many humanities scholars. The NewsEye project involves national libraries, humanities and social science research groups and computer science research groups. It addresses a number of challenges, which will result in significant scientific advances, in several directions: * in text recognition, text analysis, natural language processing, computational creativity and natural language generation, with regard to historical newspapers but also more universally, * in digital newspaper research, addressing a number of editorial issues like OCR and article separation, * in digital humanities, in respect to huge amounts of text material, availability of useful tools and possibilities of searching and browsing, * in history, in terms of analyzing historical assets with new methods across different language corpora.

Europe urgently needs to restore and intensify its engagement with its past. Time Machine will give Europe the technology to strengthen its identity against globalisation, populism and increased social exclusion, by turning its history and cultural heritage into a living resource for co-creating its future. The Large Scale Research Initiative (LSRI) will develop a large-scale digitisation and computing infrastructure mapping millennia of European historical and geographical evolution, transforming kilometres of archives, large collections from museums and libraries, and geohistorical datasets into a distributed digital information system. To succeed, a series of fundamental breakthroughs are targeted in Artificial Intelligence and ICT, making Europe the leader in the extraction and analysis of Big Data of the Past. Time Machine will drive Social Sciences and Humanities toward larger problems, allowing new interpretative models to be built on a superior scale. It will bring a new era of open access to sources, where past and on-going research are open science. This constant flux of knowledge will have a profound effect on education, encouraging reflection on long trends and sharpening critical thinking, and will act as an economic motor for new professions, services and products, impacting key sectors of European economy, including ICT, creative industries and tourism, the development of Smart Cities and land use. The CSA will develop a full LSRI proposal around the Time Machine vision. Detailed roadmaps will be prepared, organised around science and technology, operational principles and infrastructure, exploitation avenues and framework conditions. A dissemination programme aims to further strengthen the rapidly growing ecosystem, currently counting 95 research institutions, most prestigious European cultural heritage associations, large enterprises and innovative SMEs, influential business and civil society associations, and international and national institutional bodies.