Language Technologies

Zeit.shift

Zeit.shift was a digital humanities cooperation between Eurac Research, the Landesbibliothek Dr. Friedrich Teßmann (Bolzano, Italy) and the Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Tirol (Innsbruck, Austria) for the digital preservation, enrichment and dissemination of the textual heritage of historical Tyrol. The project aimed at digitising a large number of historical newspapers held at the Landesbibliothek Dr. Friedrich Teßmann and at the Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Tirol, and processing them with standard computational linguistic tools, namely Named Entity Recognition and topic classification, to make the documents available and searchable via a newly created digital portal. In addition to creating the technical environment to access the newspapers online, Zeit.shift encouraged the public to work with these materials. This was done by, on the one hand, providing online training materials (a MOOC - Massive Open Online Course) and workshops on how to use the newspapers and, on the other, by developing two contributory activities to increase citizen awareness of, and active engagement with, these historical collections (1880-1950), while exploring the potential of the activities themselves as data acquisition tools for research.

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Tags: digital cultural heritage, digitisation, OCR, gamification, crowdsourcing, historical newspapers

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