About the Project
Impresso - Media Monitoring of the Past II. Beyond Borders: Connecting Historical Newspapers and Radio is an interdisciplinary research project that leverages an unprecedented corpus of newspaper and radio archives, and uses machine learning to pursue a paradigm shift in the processing, semantic enrichment, representation, exploration and study of historical newspaper and radio collections across modalities, time, languages, and national borders.
Impresso has the objective to innovate historical research practices through original research and through the design and development of novel interfaces to access enriched and semantically linked data across languages and modalities.
Since the start of the project in September 2023, our efforts to build the corpus, develop interfaces for programmatic access have reached a mature level: Via the Impresso Datalab users can e.g. obtain data from several European institutions based on their user status and choose from a variety of pre-produced and well documented Jupyter notebooks to explore and enrich data via API and the Impresso Python library.
Impresso is carried out by the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital history (C2DH) and Swiss partners DHLAB at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), the University of Lausanne's History department, the University of Zürich's Institute for Computational Linguistics. The project is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR).
About the Fellowship
At this stage in the project, we want to ensure the real-world utility of our resources and to make adjustments as needed. We are therefore looking for excellent scholars with established research objectives to join the project and apply their workflows to our data and infrastructure. Foreseen are scholars at either postdoc or professor level.
Each fellow is expected to conduct research in their domain using Impresso infrastructure and data with the following expected output:
- Test and provide feedback regarding the utility of the Impresso infrastructure with particular focus on the Impresso Datalab platform for programmatic access to Impresso data.
- Identify and showcase novel use cases that can be realized with our infrastructure demonstrated via a Jupyter notebook, for example using embeddings to link external collections to the Impresso corpus across languages and modalities (text, image).
- Presentation of findings in a (conference) publication.
Your Profile
- Demonstrable experience in humanities research using computational methods
- PhD in history or a related field or, alternatively a PhD in computer science with experience in conducting historical research
- Great communication skills, willingness to work as part of a team
- Strong organizational and project management skills, with a proven ability to meet deadlines.
- Fluency in English is required; knowledge of French, German and/or Dutch are considered an asset.
Advantageous are:
- Knowledge of at least one programming language, preferably Python
- Knowledge of machine learning, more specifically representation learning
- Knowledge of current debates in media history
- Experience in working with data derived from historical newspaper and radio collections
The candidate will be based in the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH), a research centre for the study, analysis and public dissemination of contemporary history of Luxembourg and Europe with a particular focus on digital methods and tools for historical research. It serves as a catalyst for innovative and creative scholarship and new forms of public dissemination and societal engagement with history in Luxembourg.
How to Apply
Please submit your application in English to Guillaume Grotz (guillaume.grotz@uni.lu). Application consists of a cover letter and a CV. Cover letters should explain your motivation to apply and include a project outline (300 words) which can be realised using the Impresso Datalab infrastructure.
For any questions regarding the visiting fellowships, please contact Asst. Prof. Marten Düring (marten.during@uni.lu).
Duration: 3 months
Benefits: Covered costs for travel, housing, and a daily allowance
Fellowship Period: 1st August 2026 – 31st May 2027
Application Deadline: 1st July 2026
