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.
In recent years, newspapers were mass-digitised and are now readily available for consultation online. Keyword search remains the most popular way to find interesting articles - but is there a better way?
The Swiss-Luxembourgish project impresso. Media Monitoring of the Past thinks there is and 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.
Here is what to expect:
- An overview of the impresso user interface
- Advanced user workshops based on impresso challenges
- An introduction to the Ranke.2 project
Tuesday, 19 May 2020
14.00 - 17.30
Online (Webex)
Language spoken: English
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. Participants will be asked to sign a Non-Disclosure-Agreement prior to the workshop 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.
In cooperation with
