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Swissdox@LiRI
Access the Swissdox@LiRI database at https://swissdox.linguistik.uzh.ch/.
Find out more about the Swissdox@LiRI project at https://www.liri.uzh.ch/en/services/swissdox.html.
Swissdox@LiRI is a tool that allows you to retrieve large quantities of Swiss media data for research purposes.
LiRI cooperates with Schweizer Mediendatenbank AG (SMD) to make the Swissdox database easily accessible to researchers. The Swissdox@LiRI database includes approximately 24 million published media articles from a wide range of Swiss media sources (both print and digital) covering many decades, and is updated daily with approximately 5000 to 6000 new articles.
With Swissdox@LiRI you can retrieve articles by filtering for language, time interval, keywords, sources and document types. More metadata is available but cannot currently be used for filtering. After submitting a query, Swissdox@LiRI compiles the corresponding dataset, and notifies you when it becomes available. In this guide, Swissdox@LiRI's functionality is explained in more detail.
Note that some libraries provide access to Swissdox essentials application, which allows users to browse and search the Swissdox archive and retrieve individual texts. Unlike Swissdox@LiRI, the whole Swissdox database can be accessed through Swissdox essentials. While the Swissdox essentials service can only be used locally at those institutions, Swissdox@LiRI aims more to facilitate quantitative and/or computational language and media research.
Getting started
Upon visiting the site, you will be redirected to our login interface, where you need to select your affiliation and log in using your institutional credentials.
If you are member of a supporting institution,1) you need to provide information about at least one research project of which you form part. Other people from the same institution can be added to existing projects. Queries are associated with a research project and retrieved datasets are accessible to all project members.
Users from other institutions which have contracted Swissdox@LiRI services need to added by the account manager of their institution.
Retrieving the data from Swissdox@LiRI
The Swissdox@LiRI corpus can be queried in two ways. One way is by using the query builder in our user interface. The other way is by using the API.
Most articles are available in German and French, while fewer articles are available in Italian, Romansh and English languages. Media articles come from a large list of more than 200 sources. Time span where the majority of available articles belong is the last 25 years, but some date back to the beginning of the last century.
After the query is defined and submitted it will usually take some time for the query to complete and for your dataset be compiled. The time it takes for a query to complete is directly proportional to the amount of data requested.
When dataset is compiled you will be notified in the application itself or by email, and you will be able to download your data.
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