impresso - Media monitoring of the past
© 2017
Mining 200 years of historical newspapers. How can newspapers help understand the past? How to explore them?
"Media monitoring of the past. Mining 200 years of historical newspapers" is a brand new project starting at EPFL's DHLAB. This SNF Sinergia project in collaboration with the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History and the Zurich Institute of Computational Linguistics is also supported by librarian and historian associated partners.
Objective
The objective of the project "impresso. Media monitoring of the past. Mining 200 years of historical newspapers" is to enable critical text mining of newspaper archives with the implementation of a technological framework to extract, process, link, and explore data from print media archives. Supported by an interdisciplinary consortium composed of computational linguists, digital humanists, designers, historians, librarians and archivists, impresso (i.e. “what has been printed”) will tackle the challenges of content enrichment and data representation, visualization and analysis, completed by methodological and epistemological reflections.
Kick-off meeting and workshop
On 24 and 25 October 2017, DHLAB is hosting the kick-off meeting and first internal workshop that aims at getting the project on track. Infrastructure providers (libraries, archives), digital scholars (historians), designers and text miners will discuss their needs and interests through presentations and brainstorming sessions. They will particularly focus on the identification of suitable newspapers and feasible requirements in terms of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and interface design.