Counting articles on Delpher
Delpher is a huge archive containing digitized historic newspapers, journals, books and other sources. Developed by the National Library of the Netherlands, it is a valuable resource for both academic and informal research. I have myself used it to analyse Dutch words for bicycle.
As far as I know, there is no api to access Delpher data. For my bicycle terms analysis, I manually looked up the number of search results per decade. It would be rather laborious to look up results per year, especially if you’d want to do so for a number of terms.
Therefore, I wrote a Python script that will look up the number of results per year for a given query. Optionally, it will also look up metadata for the first 50 results per year (publication, date of publication, title and snippet), but this will take longer.