README.md

---
license: cc-by-4.0
language:
- sq
tags:
- newspaper
- historical
- kosovo
- albanian
- ocr
- vision-language
- document-understanding
- digital-humanities
pretty_name: Bujku Newspaper — Vision-Language OCR (1991–1998)
size_categories:
- 100K<n<1M
task_categories:
- image-to-text
- image-text-to-text
modality:
- image
- text
configs:
- config_name: default
  data_files:
  - split: train
    path: data/*
---

# Bujku Newspaper — Vision-Language OCR Dataset (1991–1998)

An article-level **image–text** dataset for training and evaluating OCR and
vision-language models on the Kosovo Albanian newspaper **Bujku**.
Each row pairs an **image crop of a single article** from the newspaper with its **OCR text**
and the text's **token length**.

- **Rows:** 113,300 segmented articles
- **Years covered:** 1991–1998
- **Language:** Albanian (`sq`)
- **Modalities:** image + text

## About the newspaper

**Bujku** originated as a publication focused on agricultural topics and rural
life. During the 1990s, following changes to Kosovo's institutional and media landscape that left
few Albanian-language outlets in operation, *Bujku* expanded into a daily newspaper covering the
broader news of the period. For much of the decade it was one of the main Albanian-language daily
newspapers in Kosovo. Many of its journalists had previously worked at **Rilindja**, a large
Kosovo media outlet that had ceased publication.

The newspaper is a valuable primary source for the history, language, and journalism of Kosovo in
the 1990s. The scanned issues were digitized and published by the NGO **FLOSSK** (Prishtina,
Kosovo) at <https://books.flossk.org/gazetat/>.

## Dataset structure

Each record is a single segmented newspaper article.

| Column | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| `image` | `Image` | An image crop of a single article from the newspaper, stored as an embedded image. |
| `text` | `string` | The OCR text of the article. |
| `text_token_length` | `int64` | Number of tokens in `text` (useful for filtering, batching, and length analysis). |

### Loading

```python
from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("Kushtrim/bujku_vl_ocr", split="train")

ex = ds[0]
ex["image"]              # PIL.Image of the page
print(ex["text"][:500])  # transcribed text
print(ex["text_token_length"])
```

> **Note:** this dataset is **gated** — request access on the dataset page and authenticate
> (`huggingface-cli login`) before loading.

## How the dataset was created

1. **Data collection** — Scanned PDF issues were obtained from the FLOSSK platform
   (`https://books.flossk.org/gazetat/`), organized by date as `YYYY/BU-YYYYMMDD/`.
2. **Segmentation** — Pages were segmented into individual articles, and each article was saved
   as its own image crop.
3. **OCR** — Each article image was processed with OCR to produce a clean text version.
4. **Token length** — `text_token_length` was computed over the transcribed text for each article.
5. **Packaging** — Images and text were assembled into a HuggingFace `datasets.Dataset` and
   exported as optimized Parquet.

## Intended uses

- Training and benchmarking **OCR** and **vision-language / image-to-text** models on
  historical, low-resource (Albanian) print material.
- Document understanding and layout/transcription research on degraded historical scans.
- Digital humanities and cultural-heritage preservation.

For a **text-only** version of this archive with extracted entities, topics, and semantic
embeddings (no images), see the related dataset
[Kushtrim/bujku](https://huggingface.co/datasets/Kushtrim/bujku).

## Limitations

- **Historical scan quality**: source scans are of variable quality; transcriptions may contain
  errors, especially on degraded, faded, or low-contrast articles.
- **Language & orthography**: 1990s Albanian print may include older spellings, abbreviations,
  and diacritics that affect transcription fidelity.

## Source and licensing

- Original scans: **FLOSSK** — <https://books.flossk.org/gazetat/>

## Acknowledgements

Thanks to **FLOSSK** for scanning and openly publishing the Bujku archive, preserving an important
part of Kosovo's cultural and historical heritage during one of the most sensitive periods in its
history.