The chapter focuses on the Finnish public service broadcasting company
Yle (former Yleisradio), which was founded in 1926 and on the possible
uses by digital historians of its online archive. The dataset used in
the research are non-traditional in that it consists of Yle’s archival
metadata. This digital material is analysed as a historical source
material using the method of Named Entity Recognition (NER) as it is
implemented in the digital tool the Finnish rule-based named-entity
recogniser (FiNER). This chapter explores how a canon of salient Finnish
events and persons is built up in the national audio-visual archive in
the digital age. The authors suggest that the cultural contextualising
and close reading of the themes pointed out by the results of NER-based
analysis still play an important role in the analytical process as the
metadata material, as well as the digital tool, has its limitations.