Historical newspapers are an essential source for scientific research, and new digitisation techniques can facilitate access to this material. But in practice, their use is often restricted by imperfect text recognition software, missing metadata and complicated search functions. These are the challenges being addressed by the research project impresso.
“impresso: Media monitoring of the past. Mining 200 years of historical newspapers” is a joint project run by the C²DH, the Digital Humanities Laboratory at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and the Institute of Computational Linguistics at the University of Zurich. This three-year project, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), was launched in September 2017.
The aim of the project is to develop new research methods based on a digitised corpus of newspapers and journals from Switzerland, Luxembourg, France, Belgium and Germany, covering a period of nearly 200 years. These methods include optimising text recognition, improving the identification of people, institutions and places and enhancing this entity recognition by drawing on external data repositories. Researchers in Computational linguistics will also work on structuring digitised texts, enabling “distant reading” and providing multilingual search capabilities. One of the C²DH’s tasks will be to develop a user interface which gives access to these new tools.
“If these historical sources are to be used for academic purposes, it is vital to provide information about the origins of the data and the quality of automatically generated annotations,” explains Dr Marten Düring, coordinator of the project at the C²DH. He sees this “transparency”, as well as the principle of “generosity” – providing users with additional avenues to extend their research – as essential for the design of the interface. The project employs an interdisciplinary approach, with historians, computational linguists and designers working closely together.
Regular workshops are being held so that a panel of researchers can give feedback based on their own practical experience. A C²DH post-doctoral research project on resistance movements to the idea of European unification in the late 19th and early 20th centuries will also help contribute to the development of the new tool. Finally, project findings will be incorporated into teaching programmes at the University of Lausanne.
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