Impresso seminars 2026

What is impresso?

The Impresso project – Media Monitoring of the Past – is a major European initiative transforming how researchers work with historical newspapers and radio archives. By applying machine learning and natural language processing to large-scale, multilingual collections, Impresso turns digitised media into enriched, searchable, and reusable data.

Now in its current phase (2023–2027), the project expands its scope across media types and national contexts while developing key outputs such as the Impresso web application for exploratory research and the Impresso Datalab for programmatic access to data, models, and reproducible workflows. These resources support new forms of historical inquiry, particularly into how media systems interact and evolve over time.

“Impresso - Media Monitoring of the Past II. Beyond Borders: Connecting Historical Newspapers and Radio” (“Impresso”) funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF 213585) and the Luxembourg National Research Fund (17498891), https://impresso-project.ch.

Impresso and DARIAH-CH

Impresso is closely connected to the Swiss digital humanities landscape. With the EPFL and the UZH among the leading institutions, the project contributes directly to the DARIAH-CH ecosystem (discover Impresso outputs as DARIAH-CH tools and services), strengthening national capacity in data-driven humanities research and infrastructure development.

Furthermore, Impresso’s exemplifies a broader transformation in the digital humanities. The project moves beyond simple digitisation by providing FAIR, interoperable data that can be reused across disciplines and platforms, aligning with key European priorities. At the same time, by combining NLP, interface design, and historical analysis, Impresso advances data-driven research practices and enables new, transnational perspectives through its multilingual corpora. Its tools, such as the Datalab, and its community activities further contribute to capacity building, while its collaboration with libraries, archives, and broadcasters highlights how research infrastructures can effectively connect academia with cultural heritage institutions.

Impresso Seminar spring 2026

This engagement continues through the Impresso Seminar Spring 2026, an online series dedicated to the latest developments in computational press history. The seminar provides a space for exchange between historians, data scientists, and infrastructure experts, fostering dialogue across communities and disciplines.

The series consists of three online seminars, each 1 hour long (30 min presentation + 30 min discussion), held at 12:00–13:00 CET via Microsoft Teams .

Calendar

• 2 April 2026 “Mini-Muse. A preliminary study on the integration of Natural Language Processing algorithms and data visualization to analyze publications on history”. Speakers: Giovanni Profeta & Joseph Cornelius (SUPSI)

• 7 May 2026 “Local in Name Only: Computational Methods to Mapping the Hollowing Out of UK Local News”. Speaker: Simona Bisiani (University of Surrey)

• 11 June 2026 “Press Advertisements as Urban Evidence: Mapping Armenian Paris in the XXth Century” Speaker: Chahan Vidal-Gorène (École nationale des chartes)

  
  

Registration and attendance

• Participation is free of charge

• The seminars are held online via Microsoft Teams

• To attend, participants need to register online via the event page

• After registering (or subscribing to the seminar series), attendees receive the Teams access link for each session