EPFL-UNIL course in digital humanities traces history of the press
Conveyor belt carrying freshly printed, folded newspapers from the printing press before they are transferred to the distribution station. Bussigny Printing Plant © Martin Grandjean
Presse et histoire numérique (Press and digital history) is a joint EPFL-UNIL course in the Social Sciences and Humanities (SHS) program, offering an interdisciplinary approach combining digital technology and history. Co-taught by an instructor from each institution, the course focuses on the production, dissemination and preservation of information, teaching students to look critically at the evolution of the media sphere.
The two instructors of the course are Maud Ehrmann, scientific collaborator within the Digital Humanities Laboratory (DHLAB) at the EPFL College of Humanities (CDH), and Raphaëlle Ruppen Coutaz, a senior scientist (MER) in contemporary history at UNIL.
The course, which began in the 2015-16 academic year, invites students to explore the history of the media in Switzerland over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries. The course is structured around three perspectives – the production, distribution, and preservation of information – the course looks at the history of the press, the evolution of journalistic practices, information in times of war, the phenomenon of fake news, the workings of an editorial office and a printing center, as well as the preservation of press archives and the possibilities for exploring them digitally. The course uses and contributes to the resources of to the Impresso - Media Monitoring of the Past - Beyond Borders project, of which Ehrmann and Coutaz are among the co-Principal Investigators.
“This link with the Impresso project nourishes the teaching, and the teaching nourishes the Impresso project,” says Coutaz.
At the intersection of digital history and media history, this course offers an innovative approach. By exploring digitized press archives using digital tools, students learn to critically analyze massive amounts of data from the past. This year, a “public history” dimension has been added to the program.
"As a teacher, you never know how students will react to an interdisciplinary approach,” says Ehrmann.
Working in mixed groups (UNIL/EPFL) wherever possible, this year the students carried out virtual exhibitions on the major changes in the history of the Swiss French-speaking press in the 20th and 21st centuries which drew on the course lectures along with visits to various local media, such as the 24 Heures editorial office, the Bussigny printing center, the archives of the Lausanne Cantonal and University Library, and interviews the students conducted with professionals in the industry.
A dual approach
“This course was one of the first SHS courses at EPFL open to UNIL students, initially on an experimental basis,” says Coutaz. “The heterogeneity of the participants presented a challenge: on the one hand, non-historians, engineering students from various sections and, on the other, history students without advanced computer skills. Setting up mixed groups of UNIL/EPFL students allows them to share their know-how with one another.”
“The teachers complemented each other, one with a historical approach, the other with a computer science approach,” says Max Sterckx, “They greatly facilitated the collaboration between the UNIL and EPFL students and helped us complete our final projects.”
“Working with different people was motivating,” adds Apolinario Joao De Pinho Oliveira, an EPFL master’s student in physics. “Personally, I learned a lot from the UNIL student who worked with us, particularly about how to conduct historical research in a rigorous and scientific manner.”
“The collaboration between students went very well,” agrees Céline Beuchotte, an UNIL student. “It was particularly enriching to be able to exchange ideas with students from completely different backgrounds.”
This year, each group made a virtual exposition of their projects that they shared online. The final multimedia research projects covered a range of topics, such as the life and death of the printing press, women typographers and journalists in French-speaking Switzerland in the 20th century, and journalism in the digital age.
“Through the exhibition we designed with our group, entitled “Encrées dans l'histoire : les femmes typographes et journalistes en Suisse romande au XXe siècle”, we realized that despite the recent nature of this subject, it remains little studied by historiography, not least because of the limited corpus of sources available,” says UNIL student Amina Taletovic. “More generally, the course also showed us the importance of the interdisciplinary approach, which, for example, enables historians to access sources more quickly thanks to digitization, without having to go through the physical archives.”
Adds Ehrmann: “It has been a real pleasure to see EPFL students get into historical topics and become passionate about applying their technical and engineering skills to co-build projects with UNIL students, and to witness how they discover each other's worlds.”
One Campus EPFL-UNIL: addressing social issues through interdisciplinarity
While co-teaching is now commonplace, learning with students from other schools is rarer and, moreover, difficult to implement. However, such a practice develops each individual's ability to understand the contributions of other disciplines and to situate their own skills within a common project. The problems that future engineers will have to solve require this ability to engage in dialogue and interdisciplinary collaboration. For this reason, EPFL's SHS Program has been developing a range of courses designed to bring together and train students from UNIL and EPFL for several years.
Marc Laperrouza, educational coordinator of the SHS Program, coordinates the “One Campus” initiative. He notes that inter-university collaborative work teaches students to compromise and exposes them to complex issues that take them beyond the disciplinary fields in which they are accustomed to working. “These courses allow students to compare their different epistemological perspectives and build bridges between their disciplinary fields,” he explains.
Nine courses have been selected at UNIL: four from the Faculty of Arts, two from the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, two from the Faculty of Business Studies, and one from the Faculty of Law. “We hope that this program will enable students to develop cross-disciplinary skills, which are highly sought after in the professional world,” Marc Laperrouza adds.
Find out more about the SHS Program's “One Campus” initiative: https://www.epfl.ch/schools/cdh/education-2/social-and-human-sciences-shs-program/courses-open-to-unil-and-epfl-students/
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Photo: Conveyor belt carrying freshly printed, folded newspapers from the rotary press before they are transferred to the distribution station. Bussigny Printing Plant – EPFL-SHS visit on November 9, 2022, to the Lausanne Printing Center in Bussigny (permanently closed on March 14, 2025). Photo credit: Martin Grandjean.