This paper presents a collaboration between computer scientists,
linguists and historians studying the material aspects of newspapers and
developing a tool for that purpose. The paper describes how the
back-and-forth collaboration in terms of research questions and
technical challenges yielded insights both for solving computational
problems as well as refining historical analysis. In the project,
existing metadata was amended by reconstructing new materiality data
from the Finnish digitised newspaper corpora. The analysis of such data
is crucial for studying the development of newspapers, but can also
inform other computational studies on the same data. The use of enriched
materiality data allows for better understanding subdivisions in large
corpora such as digitised newspapers, but also highlight that content
and form interact. Content analysis of newspapers should therefore
always take into account material properties of the studied material to
properly grasp the cultural, social and political meanings embedded in
the sources.