Keyword search remains the most popular way to find interesting articles in digitised newspapers – but is there a better way?
What shall we do with yesterday’s news? Historical newspapers are mirrors of past societies. Published over centuries on a regular basis, they record wars and minor events, report on international, national and local matters, and document day-to-day life. They reflect the political, social and economic contexts in which they were produced and help us understand how people in the past experienced their time.
But how to explore large corpora of digitised historical newspapers?
The Swiss-Luxembourgish project impresso. Media Monitoring of the Past uses text mining tools to extract, process, link and visualise information from Luxembourgish and Swiss newspapers. This allows us for example to track the mentions of specific persons and places over time, to explore thematics such as sports or culture and to detect reused text passages across newspapers. To access and explore all this newly generated data we developed a new user interface and a range of didactic materials which help to foster a better understanding of the advantages and challenges of digitisation.
To better explain how all this works, this Forum Z combines presentations with hands-on testing of the interface and accompanying didactic materials.
Language spoken: English.
Organised in cooperation with the Bibliothèque nationale du Luxembourg.
Programme
14.00 – 15.00
Introducing the impresso interface for the exploration of historical newspapers
A guided tour of the interface and how it changes the way we search and find together explanations of the underlying enrichments from our experts in computational linguistics.
15.15 – 15.45
Interfaces and data repositories at the National Library of Luxembourg
An introduction to the BNL’s new user interface for historical newspapers and an overview of the growing data repository they make available for research.
16.00 – 17.00
Impresso user workshop
Interactive workshop with step-by-step instructions on how to become an impresso power user.
Important: Prior to the workshop, participants will be asked a separate registration to this workshop and to sign a Non-Disclosure-Agreement so as to gain access to the full impresso corpus.
17.00 – 17.30
Introduction to the Ranke.2 learning platform
Interactive workshop which introduces researchers and teachers to the digital learning platform Ranke.2 and its lesson on historical newspapers.
Registration
Registration is free of charge, but mandatory. You can register to the presentation, the impresso workshop, the Ranke.2 introduction or to all three. A link to join the event will be sent to all registered participants at the beginning. If you wish to participate in the impresso user workshop, please download and sign the Non-Disclosure-Agreement and mail it to info@impresso-project.ch until 18 May at the latest.