134 persons from all over Europe joined our effort to move the ForumZ event series from an on-site meeting that would have taken place at the National Library of Luxembourg (BNL) to the now familiar sphere of video conferencing.
The event began with a general introduction to the goals of the impresso project and its ambition to advance tools for the automated enrichment and exploration of historical newspapers.
As co-host, the BNL presented its own digitisation policies for newspapers and their efforts for more transparency in the production of such collections. During the breaks, the impresso fake news quiz challenged participants to tell historical newspaper articles from automatically generated text.
This was followed by a virtual hands-on workshop with the impresso interface in which participants were introduced to the basic and advanced search and exploration features, such as filtering by topic or the visual comparison of collections.
Finally, Stefania Scagliola presented Ranke.2, a digital literacy teaching platform developed by the C²DH. The Ranke.2 lesson on digitised newspapers inspired some of the participants to launch a cooperation on the issue of source criticism of digitised newspapers.
Overall, the online format proved to be a viable means to engage with a large audience about the opportunities inherent in digitised newspapers, be it for research, public outreach or for teaching.
