Navigating through 200 Years of Historical Newspapers
Yannick Rochat Frédéric Kaplan Cyril Bornet Vincent Buntinx Maud Ehrmann
This paper describes the processes which led to the creation of an innovative interface to access a digital archive composed of two Swiss newspapers, namely Gazette de Lausanne (1798–1998) and Journal de Gen`eve (1826–1998). Based on several textual processing steps, including lexical indexation, n-grams computation and named entity recognition, a general purpose web-based application was designed and implemented ; it allows a large variety of users (e.g. historians, journalists, linguists and the general public) to explore different facets of about 4 million press articles spanning an almost 200 hundred years period.