Call for Associated Researchers

The impresso project is looking for associated researchers working in History, Digital Humanities, Media studies and related fields to work with us on the development of novel tools for the study of historical newspapers. We invite you to bring your field expertise in historical research methodologies. impresso. Media Monitoring of the Past consists of a vibrant, interdisciplinary team of historians, computational linguists, engineers and designers based in Luxembourg and Switzerland.

With this call we seek to extend the circle of historians affiliated to the project at infoclio.ch, Université de Lausanne (UNIL), and the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital history (C2DH) in order to make our corpus and resources available to a larger number of users.

The project is currently building up a corpus of Swiss, German, Luxembourgish, French and Belgian newspapers starting from the mid-19th century. At this stage, the corpus includes Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Le Temps, the collections of the Swiss National Library, the Luxembourgish National Library as well as collections from a number of other providers of European newspapers. The inclusion of French and German titles is planned. This corpus will be available for associated researchers until the end of the project in 2020. An overview of the current composition of the corpus can be found here.

In addition, associated researchers will have the opportunity to work together closely with our team of computational linguists based at the University of Zürich’s Institute for Computational Linguistics and the DHLAB at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) as well as a team of designers and developers based at the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital history (C2DH).

Associated researchers are invited to submit a short description of concrete ideas and research questions which can be addressed with the help of historical newspapers within the impresso corpus. These projects can also complement ongoing research or take the form of graduate theses. An interest in (Swiss) economic history, gender, and media history as well as quantitative methods will be considered as an advantage but is not required.Limited funding is available for the participation in user workshops; salary costs can however not be covered.

Associated researchers will have access to

• the impresso newspaper corpus until the end of the project in August 2020
• beta versions of the exploration interface
• regular user workshops organised in conjunction with the above-mentioned associated partners in history

Associated researchers will have the opportunity to work closely with

• a team of researchers in Computational Linguistics to support their research
• a team of designers and developers for work on custom data visualisations

Associated researchers are expected to

• develop and pursue a historical research project based on the impresso corpus, including complementary research to ongoing projects as well as MA and Phd theses
• provide feedback on tools and interfaces in development by the impresso project

General frame of participation

• the time frame for associated research projects is from June 2018 to March 2020 depending on copyright restrictions, Associated Researchers may be requested to sign Non-Disclosure Agreements prior to gaining access to the corpus and other legal documents subject to the concrete nature of their research projects
• salary costs can not be covered

If you are interested, please send a short abstract with your ideas together with a short bio to info@impresso-project.ch.

We very much look forward to discussing your ideas with you,

The impresso team