lifeofacomputationallinguist

Or shaping the future of newspaper archive digitisation I admit this is a rather promising title which raises many expectations. But this goes along the lines with the motto of the SNSF Sinergia programme, which enables researchers to produce breakthrough research. And we want to live up to this motto ;-). So, there we were, on the magnificent EPFL campus on the beautiful morning of the 24th of October, ready for a two day kick-off workshop. view from the EPFL campus This was in fact the first meet-up of the entire consortium, consisting of the research groups from EPFL, the C2DH lab from Luxembourg, the Institute of Computational Linguistics from the University of Zurich, the historians from the University of Lausanne, archivists from Le Temps, NZZ, the Swiss and Luxembourg National Library, the Swiss Economic Archives, the Archives from the Canton of Wallis, representatives from infoclio.ch, and other invited partners and friends. I hope I did not forget anybody :-).

The impresso-project Website is Online! Only a minor entry today: our project website is online! Feel free to browse and if you have questions, insights you want to share, or any suggestions, please let us know :-) www.impresso-project.ch

Data acquisition phase has started As holds true for every project, I assume, the data that will be worked with is of vital importance. Our aim in the impresso project is to digitise and process various newspapers from the late 18th to the 20th century (200 years in total) so that historians can explore the data in previously unseen and unknown ways. As such, we will provide new tools to do research in history, and who knows, maybe we will also take a leading role in revolutionising how historical research will be done in a few years ;-). But again, all this will not be able without any data. Already during the project application phase we contacted libraries in Switzerland and Luxembourg and asked them whether they have data available for our project. Many institutions gladly followed our call and committed themselves to assist us as good as they can. We are very happy that, for example, both the National Libraries of Luxembourg, as well as its Swiss counterpart are on board! T

And off we go ... This being my first blog post which summarises a whole month, I think I'll touch upon some of the issues I had to deal with. I expect there will be some more blog entries following which will be dedicated to specific problems or insights. My aim is to blog like once a week, let's see where this will get us. It's been a little more than a month now since we could officially announce our SNF project as "on-going". More concretely, three institutions, namely the C²DH Lab at the University of Luxembourg, the DHLAB at the EPFL, and the Institute of Computational Linguistics at the University of Zurich set out to mine 200 years of newspaper data. We called the project impresso, which is the the perfect participle of the Latin word "imprimere", which means "to press", "to imprint", or "to stamp". Quite a fitting project name, I would say! So far, my role has been quite a modest one in this undertaking