The PortADa project explores new ways of studying maritime and port history through the combined use of historical research and digital technologies. Its main objective is to construct a large, structured database of maritime and port-related information extracted from historical newspapers, while at the same time fostering the creation of an interdisciplinary community of digital humanists composed of historians and computer scientists capable of working together and sharing a common analytical language.

At its core, PortADa is not only a data-driven project, but also a collaborative experiment in interdisciplinary research. It seeks to bridge methodological and conceptual gaps between the humanities and computer science, enabling historians to formulate historically meaningful questions and technologists to translate those questions into computational solutions.

The presentation will outline the general aims and structure of the project, before focusing on the main technological developments implemented so far. These include the tools and workflows designed for large-scale information extraction from historical newspapers, as well as the challenges posed by data quality, heterogeneity, and historical context. Attention will be given to the current phase of the project being developed in Rethymno, which focuses on disambiguation processes as a crucial step for transforming extracted data into reliable historical knowledge.

By combining historical expertise with advanced computational methods, PortADa aims to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of maritime networks and port cities, while also offering a model for sustainable collaboration between historians and computer scientists in the field of digital humanities.