Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 40, No. 62.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
                      Hosted by DH-Cologne
                       www.dhhumanist.org
                Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org




        Date: 2026-06-18 13:59:52+00:00
        From: Ferdaous AFFAN <ferdaous.affan@uni.lu>
        Subject: [Call for participation] Impresso@BnF Datathon, 28–30 Oct 2026: Historical Media Across Languages and Modalities

Dear colleagues,

We are pleased to invite researchers to the Impresso@BnF Datathon, a three-day
hands-on research event co-organised by the Impresso project (https://impresso-
project.ch/) and the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF,
https://www.bnf.fr<https://www.bnf.fr/>), hosted at the BnF in Paris on 28–30
October 2026.

Impresso@BnF Datathon, 28–30 Oct 2026: Historical Media Across Languages and
Modalities

A hands-on research event at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF)

About the event

This datathon brings together an international group of researchers curious
about the computational analysis of historical media collections across
languages and modalities and offers them tools, data, models, and expert
support. The event will rely on English as a shared language.

Participants will work in small teams on self-defined research questions,
drawing on BnF's collections and Impresso resources: a multilingual media
corpus, derived datasets, NLP and vision models, and the Impresso Datalab. The
Impresso team will be present throughout to guide, support, and collaborate.

Programme overview

The event unfolds over three days at the BnF:

  *   Day 1 (afternoon): Introduction to the Impresso Web App and Datalab
through presentations and live demonstrations; group formation around shared
research interests

  *   Days 2 & 3: Hands-on research work, with guided sessions on embeddings and
data-driven analysis, team project time, and a closing round of group
presentations and collective reflection

Sessions are designed with flexibility in mind: participants can engage with
specific components according to their experience level and research focus.
Dedicated exchange “stations” allow for direct, informal conversation with
organisers at any point during the event.

Participation is limited to a maximum of 30 people to ensure a productive,
discussion-oriented environment.

During registration, you will be asked to briefly describe your research
interests. These responses will directly shape the event agenda and the
selection of case studies, so we encourage you to be specific.

What Impresso offers

At the heart of this datathon is the Impresso Datalab, a research environment
for the computational analysis of digitised historical press, combining an
exploration interface with a computational workspace. Participants will have
access to:

  *   The Impresso Web App (https://impresso-project.ch/app): an interface for
exploring and querying a semantically enriched multilingual corpus of digitised
newspapers and radio broadcasts

  *   The Impresso Datalab (https://impresso-project.ch/datalab): a
computational environment for data-driven analysis, accompanied by derived
datasets, NLP models (available on Hugging Face), and multimodal embeddings
enabling cross-lingual text search, image-text linking, and semantic analysis
across heterogeneous archival collections

  *   Dedicated training materials and case study Jupyter notebooks to support
participants across a range of technical backgrounds

Whether your sources are in French, German, English, or another European
language, and whether you work with text, images, or both, the Datalab provides
tools to connect, annotate, and query historical collections at scale.

Registration

This datathon is well suited for:

  *   Historians and media scholars working with digitised press archives

  *   Digital humanities researchers interested in computational methods for
cultural heritage

  *   Information scientists and librarians exploring AI-powered access to
archival collections

  *   Advanced students and early-career researchers with an interest in
historical data analysis

👉Register here: https://forms.gle/hQpNBrtMRVhKuMCp9

Prior programming or data analysis experience is helpful but not required.
Ready-to-use case study notebooks will be provided to lower the barrier to
entry, and the Impresso team will offer hands-on support throughout.

We look forward to welcoming you to Paris for what we hope will be a productive
and enjoyable few days.

For questions, please contact info@impresso-project.ch

With best regards,
Ferdaous Affan, on belhaf of the Impresso Team


--

Ferdaous Affan
Doctoral Researcher
Luxembourg Centre For Contemporary and Digital History​​
UNIVERSITÉ DU LUXEMBOURG
CAMPUS BELVAL
Maison des Sciences Humaines
ferdaous.affan@uni.lu  /
www.uni.lu


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