The Impresso Project’s Approach to Historical Media Analysis
Marten Düring and Maud Ehrmann
Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH)
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Digital Humanities Laboratory of the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Abstract
In the impresso project, a team of computational linguists, historians and designers strive to enable data-driven analyses of historical media across time, institutional silos, media types and languages. To this end we compile a corpus of historical newspaper and radio collections with the help of Western European partners, enrich it using text mining techniques and develop user interfaces for their exploration and computational analysis.
Bios
Marten has a robust background at the crossroads of cultural history, digital humanities, and computational methods. He has a rich academic trajectory, including a PhD in Contemporary History from the University of Mainz, with his dissertation focusing on the emergence of covert networks during World War II. Marten has contributed his expertise to various institutions, such as Radboud University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and has been integral to digital history initiatives at C2DH since 2016. At C2DH, Marten serves as a principal investigator for the impresso project, which seeks to revolutionize the way historical newspaper and radio collections are accessed and analyzed, transcending barriers of language and national borders. His role encompasses coordinating interface development and steering digital history research within the team. Additionally, Marten is a founding editor of the Journal of Historical Network Research and leads the coordination of the Historical Network Research Community. His commitment to the field is also evident through his involvement in the Hands-on History lecture series and his proactive engagement in support activities for Ukrainian scholars by the C2DH center following the 2021 crisis. Marten’s work not only reflects his dedication to enhancing the tools available for historical research but also underscores the potential of interdisciplinary approaches that meld historical inquiry with technological innovation. His presence as a speaker is a testament to his leadership in shaping the future of digital history.
Maud is a research scientist and lecturer at the Digital Humanities Laboratory of the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne. She holds a PhD in Computational Linguistics from the Paris Diderot University (Paris 7) and has been engaged in a large number of scientific projects centred on information extraction and text analysis, both for present-time and historical documents. Before joining the DHLAB, she worked at the Linguistics Computing Laboratory at the Sapienza University of Rome where she worked on the BabelNet resource and contributed to the LIDER project (2013-2014). Prior to that, she worked at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre in Ispra, Italy, as member of the OPTIMA unit (now Text and Data mining unit) which develops innovative and application-oriented solutions (Europe Media Monitor) for retrieving and extracting information from the Internet with a focus on high multilinguality (2009-2013). Previously, she worked at the Xerox Europe Research Centre in Grenoble, France (now Naver Labs Europe) in the Parsing and Semantics unit, first as PhD candidate supported by a CIFRE grant (2005-2008), then as a post-doctoral researcher (2008-2009). There, her research focused mainly on the automatic processing and fine-grained analysis of entities of interest, specifically named entities and temporal expressions.
SIGHUM 