Swissdox: Research in Swiss media

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Since February, researchers and students at UZH have been able to search directly and easily in the huge media database Swissdox. In June, the new service Swissdox@LiRI received the SwissNLP award.

Swissdox is an online media database that offers more than 23 million articles from Swiss print and online media. The holdings date back to 1911 and cover all major publishers, growing by several thousand articles daily. The data provider is the Swiss Media Database SMD, the central research platform of journalists.

Free use of Swissdox at UZH

In principle, the Swissdox database is open to all interested parties for a fee. For research purposes, Swissdox could previously be used free of charge, but only in a cumbersome way. This has now changed: During 2021, the technology platform “Linguistic Research Infrastracture” (LiRI) of the Linguistics Center Zurich has established a cooperation with Swissdox. Swissdox@LiRI enables UZH members to search freely and easily in the media database.

Since March 2022, researchers and students have been able to register their research project via an access form and then independently search the text holdings using the search mask specially developed by LiRI. Be it for proseminar papers, postdoctoral theses or independent research projects.

Click here for the database: https://swissdox.linguistik.uzh.ch/

Project has a nationwide impact

The Swissdox database is a goldmine for research in the humanities and social sciences. For example, the Swissdox@LiRI collaboration was awarded the annual SwissNLP (Swiss Association for Natural Language Processing) prize this June.

The project was initiated on the UZH side by Prof. Noah Bubenhofer from the German Department and Prof. Fabrizio Gilardi from the Institute of Political Science. Project partners so far are ZHAW, ETH Zurich and the Universities of Bern and Basel. Further partnerships with Swiss universities are being sought.

Martina Kammermann, Communication&Innovation Team