1914 in a Timeline

6th Swiss Open Cultural Data Hackathon

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• About GLAMhack 2020
• Project Details
  • Open Data Information
  • Concept / Documentation
• License
• Contact information

About GLAMhack 2020

The 2020 Edition of the Swiss Open Cultural Data Hackathon will take place on 5-6 June as an ONLINE hackathon. This edition is virtually hosted by the Swiss Institute for Information Science at the FHGR Chur, in collaboration with the Institute for Multimedia Production. The focus of the GLAMhack will lie on Linked Open Data, Machine Learning, Human-Computer-Interaction and Crowdsourcing. Once again, we are happy to collaborate with Wikimedia CH, infoclio.ch and other members of the Friends of OpenGLAM Network.

Link to dataset: https://opendata.swiss/de/dataset/journal-de-geneve-gazette-de-lausanne-1914

Project Details

Open Data Information

The Historical database of Le Temps comprises 3 newspapers over 200 years. The Journal de Genève ran from 1826 to 1998, the Gazette de Lausanne (under different names) from 1798 to 1998, and the Nouveau Quotidien from 1991 to 1998, before the merging to the present Le Temps. The full archive was digitized and OCRed (extraction of digital text) in 2008. The project is of interest for the community because newspaper databases are becoming a widespread reality across Europe, calling for dedicated techniques to fully exploit them.

Concept / Documentation

1914 was an interesting year not only because of the beginning of the First World War. The first cars clattered along unpaved dust roads, the first telephone lines crackled, trams drove through rapidly growing cities: Switzerland from the beginning of 1914 was dynamic and ambitious. But the war brought fear and uncertainty to the neutral country.

In our project we take a look at Switzerland in 1914, when Switzerland had 3.8 million inhabitants and life expectancy was around 54 years.

In addition, a rift between German- and French-speaking Swiss also developed during this period. After Germany's invasion of Belgium, many Belgians fled to France, from where they wanted to reach French-speaking Switzerland. Swiss who wanted to take in such refugees were asked to register with a private organization in Lausanne. Within a few weeks, hundreds of applications were received there. This hospitality caused frowning in German-speaking Switzerland.

This was the beginning of a rift called the "Röstigraben" which still runs along the language border today.

On Opendata.swiss we found the data of two French-speaking Swiss newspapers from 1914. The data include articles of the year 1914 of the newspapers "Gazette de Lausanne" and "Tribune de Genève". Our plan was to translate as many articles as possible into German using the Google Cloud Translation or the DeepL API. After some conception-work we decided not to use these APIs because we didn't need them. We wanted to focus only on a few articles of special events which can be translated manually. We thought it would be better only to publish relevant

The translated articles are being published on a website and are being enriched with similar articles from nowadays.

License

Distributed under the MIT license. For more information, see 'LICENSE'.

Contact information

Sandro Anderes - https://sandroanderes.ch - hi@sandroanderes.ch
Frank Zinsli - https://frankzinsli.ch - frank.zinsli@gmail.com
Bernhard Aebersold - https://bernhardaebersold.ch - beni.aebersold@gmail.com
David Indiumi

Projekt link: https://glamhack2020.sandroanderes.ch/