Impresso is a 3-year collaborative research project between the Digital Humanities Laboratory at EPFL, the Institute for Computational Linguistics at Zurich University and the C²DH, fully funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.
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. In a nutshell, they keep track of history at every level, and the wealth of information they offer as well as their inherent contextualisation makes them invaluable primary sources for historians.
The objective of the project is to enable critical text mining of multilingual newspaper archives (from Switzerland, Luxembourg and Belgium) 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”) tackles the challenges of content enrichment and data representation, visualization and analysis, completed by methodological and epistemological reflections.
Expected outcomes include, among others, a set of natural language processing (NLP) tools dedicated to historical print media, visualization interfaces for active exploration and critical analysis of newspaper corpora in a transparent manner, as well as a digital history research project on resistance to European unification in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The role of the C²DH team is to develop a novel interface for searching historical newspapers, which facilitates exploration and meets the requirements of scholarly research. A team of historians, designers, developers and computational linguists are working together to achieve this goal by using co-design principles.
The project is a great opportunity to strengthen C2DH’s competences in developing interfaces reflecting the principles of digital hermeneutics and acting as cognitive models of critical digital history.
To boost the relevance of the project for history, the humanities and social sciences in general, the C²DH launched a series of workshops that provide a forum for users and developers to exchange their ideas.
The history of justice in Luxembourg from 1815 to the present day
At a press conference on 29 January 2018, Andreas Fickers (C²DH) and Félix Braz (Ministry of Justice) signed an agreement to launch a research project on the history of justice in Luxembourg.
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Shaping a digital memory platform on migration: a public history project on Italian and Portuguese migration memories
The Memorecord crowdsourcing initiative is part of the PhD research project entitled “Shaping a digital memory platform on migration narratives: A public history project on Italian and Portuguese migration memories in Luxembourg”, conducted by Anita Lucchesi at the University of Luxembourg’s Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH) and funded by the Luxembourg National Research Fund.
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Populärkultur transnational - Europa in den langen 1960er Jahren
A new interdisciplinary research group composed of members of the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH), the Institute for History at the University of Luxembourg and Saarland University will investigate transnational transfers of popular culture in Europe in the 1960s.
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Platform for teaching digital source criticism
Ranke.2 is a teaching platform that offers lessons on how to critically assess and work with digital historical sources.
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Digital exhibition Éischte Weltkrich: Remembering the Great War in Luxembourg
The digital exhibition Éischte Weltkrich: Remembering the Great War in Luxembourg is a project developed by the C²DH with the aim of addressing an important but neglected and understudied period in the country’s history.
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