The Foggia Occupator Corpus: Digitisation, Annotation, and Computational Analysis of an Occupation-Era Newspaper (1945-1946)

Historical newspapers are crucial sources yet often remain undigitised or lack machine-readable text. We present the Foggia Occupator corpus, a linguistically enriched, openly licensed resource built from twenty-two issues (Dec 1945 to Aug 1946) of a weekly newspaper produced by U.S. personnel in occupied Foggia, Italy. High-resolution scans were processed via OCR with LLM-assisted correction (GPT-4o) and full human verification, then segmented into 874 articles (~216k tokens). We annotate topics, named entities and typed relations via a semi-automatic pipeline with manual reconciliation, and perform argument mining on civics- and conflict-related content, yielding 1,735 arguments. The entity-relation layer supports network analyses that reveal sparse, modular structures linking military units, civic bodies, and social life. We release TEI-XML with entity spans, JSON article files with metadata, CSVs of entities/relations with temporal counts, and an arguments JSON, all under a Creative Commons 4.0 licence. Beyond documenting an in-between moment of reconstruction, the resource enables benchmarking for OCR-robust NER/RE and studies of framing, stance, and community structure in post-war local media.