Petroleum and Press – Concepts about Oil in Polish Periodical Press, 1853–1918

The dataset consists of 18,361 issues of approximately 800 Polish-language periodicals, published between 1 January 1853 and 31 December 1918, that mention petroleum. The majority of the periodicals have been published in territories historically associated with Poland, but the dataset also includes issues of diasporic Polish-language periodicals published in other parts of Europe, Brazil, and the United States. The original public-domain digital images of physical documents were downloaded as OCRed PDFs, along with their metadata, from the Polona aggregator in May 2023. The documents were selected based on a petroleum-related keyword search. Layout recognition and segmentation were conducted on the periodicals, the OCR was redone, and the dataset was formatted to METS/MODS. The files are stored in the MPDL Keeper system. The dataset has high potential for reuse by those interested in environmental history, history of science, or energy history.