Zeit.shift: Driving Citizens to Tyrolean Historical Newspapers

Greta Franzini (Eurac Research)

Seminario di Cultura Digitale – Mercoledì 10 maggio 2023

In this seminar we will present Zeit.shift, an ongoing digital humanities cooperation between Eurac Research (Bolzano), the Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Tirol (Innsbruck) and the Landesbibliothek Dr. Friedrich Teßmann (Bolzano) for the digital preservation, enrichment and dissemination of the textual heritage of historical Tyrol (2020-2023).
Zeit.shift has digitised approximately 600,000 pages of historical Tyrolean newspapers (German language) and seeks to promote access to these digital collections through the development of games, activities and an e-learning course.
Among other things, Zeit.shift has developed:
1. an annotation activity inviting specialists, hobbyists and the general public to (geo)tag historical newspaper advertisements to help recreate the economic landscape of Tyrol from roughly 100 years ago.
2. a custom typing game for middle schools and the general public to increase players’ awareness of the digitised newspaper collections, their ability to read historical documents written in Gothic script (Fraktur) and their knowledge of Tyrolean history.
3. A MOOC on the use of historical newspapers as sources for research and providing an introduction to digital methods in the humanities with a focus on historical newspapers.
While the annotation activity and the custom web game are primarily geared towards user engagement, their design also serves to collect data to research automated means of crowdsourcing annotations and OCR corrections in order to improve the searchability of the digitised collections.