The 1st PressMint Workshop on Creating Interoperable Corpora of Historical Newspapers (PressMint-LREC2026) will be held as part of the LREC 2026 International Conference, in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, on 16 May 2026.
Historical newspapers are of interest to historians and historical linguists, as well as to social and political scientists, ethnologists, anthropologists, media and communication scholars, and researchers in cultural studies. All of these are fields where contemporary digital resources, tools and methods (e.g. “distant reading”) are still underutilised. On the other hand, corpora of historical newspapers already exist for a number of languages and countries to a large extent, as they are out of copyright. Also, the images, and often OCR, are available through the national libraries. Also, in recent years these data started to be of big interest to the researchers since they preserve the historical, cultural, political, societal past. However, these corpora are not interoperable, which precludes methods for their comparison, as well as any translingual and transnational research. An initial joint attempt towards the creation of a corpus of historical newspapers from the beginning of 20th century on, is the CLARIN flagship project PressMint. The project features data from 20 partners at the moment, aiming to develop a standard for interoperable resources of newspapers in diachronic timespans. The final goal is to provide structured and high quality multilingual data in a common format, with the same type of linguistic annotation that covers (at least partially) the same time period.
The PressMint workshop aims to gather experts interested in creating, processing and analyzing interoperable corpora of historical data in general, but especially with a focus on newspapers. Another very important objective is to consider also the perspective of the communities who use historical data - their purposes, requirements, feedback.
The workshop is supported by CLARIN ERIC and the PressMint project.
More information can be found here.
Paper submission deadline: 1 March 2026
