Projects
Data Scopes (2018 — )
Project website: Data Scopes
Data Scopes is a concept for dealing with complex data in a humanities research context. With this concept we want to communicate to contribute to methodological reflection on the processes of preparing and analyzing humanities research data, and how they shape and contribute to interpretation. The Data Scopes concept and framework were developed by Rik Hoekstra and Marijn Koolen at the Humanities Cluster of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Impact of Fiction (2021 — )
Project website: Impact of Fiction
Impact of Fiction is a project in which we investigate the impact that literary fiction has on its readers.
Republic (2019 — )
Project website: Republic
Republic is an infrastructure project that published the Resolutions of the States General of the Dutch Republic (1576-1796) in a computational environment. This project is funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research.
Maritime Careers (2019 — )
Project website: Maritime Careers
Seafarers are a fascinating class of workers. They form a dynamic labour force, characterised over the past 400 years by varying levels of internationalisation. In a number of related research projects, we delve into the functioning of maritime labour markets and the characteristics of the seagoing workforce, and the changes these underwent over time. We are interested in questions such as: how did skill levels of seamen develop over the centuries? How international was the maritime sector? And what changes in the level of internationalisation do we witness over time? What differences can we observe between careers of native and migrant sailors?
Legal Structures (2014 — )
Project website: Legal Structures
Legal Structures takes a radically novel approach to the problem of measuring and visualizing differences among legal systems: it focuses on machine coding of internal references in codes and laws.
Building towards Interactive Information Retrieval Resource Reuse (BIIRRR) (2018 — )
Project website: Building towards Interactive Information Retrieval Resource Reuse (BIIRRR)
The Building towards Interactive Information Retrieval Resource Reuse project (BIIRRR) consists of a number of initiatives aimed at making re-use within IIR studies simpler
Digital Tool Criticism (2015 — 2019)
Project website: Digital Tool Criticism
This project aims to contribute to a better understanding of digital tools and the discussion of how to evaluate and incorporate them in research. The overall goal is to provide insight in the actual use and practice of digital tool criticism, offer a ready-made format for a workshop on digital tool criticism, give insight in aspects that play a role in digital tool criticism, propose an elaborate model for digital tool criticism that can be used as common ground for further conversations in the field, and finally, provide recommendations for future workshops, researchers, data custodians, and tool builders.
CLARIAH Scholarly Web Annotation (2015 — )
Project website: CLARIAH Scholarly Web Annotation
Within CLARIAH, the working group on Scholarly Web Annotation aims to facilitate scholarly annotation across media types in an open, reusable, sharable, and publishable way. To achieve this, we are building a Scholarly Web Annotation Client and experimenting with a server for scholarly web annotations, which will be integrated during the CLARIAH infrastructure in the future. We also work on developing different viewers for annotations of different media types.
Supporting Complex Search Tasks (2015 — 2017)
Project website: Supporting Complex Search Tasks
There is broad consensus in the field of IR that search is complex in many use cases and applications, both on the Web and in domain specific collections, and both professionally and in our daily life. Yet our understanding of complex search tasks, in comparison to simple look up tasks, is fragmented at best. Supporting complex search task requires new collaborations across the whole field of IR, and the proposed workshop will bring together a diverse group of researchers to work together on one of the greatest challenges of our field.
Social Book Search (2011 — 2016)
Project website: Social Book Search
The Social Book Search (SBS) Lab investigates book search in scenarios where users search with more than just a query, and look for more than objective metadata. Real-world information needs are generally complex, yet almost all research focuses instead on either relatively simple search based on queries or recommendation based on profiles. The goal is to research and develop techniques to support users in complex book search tasks.
Beyond the Book (2014 — 2015)
Project website: Beyond the Book
The impact of globalization on culture and literature is quite significant. However, works of fiction still face stumbling blocks when translated to for readers from another culture. In many cases, when reading a book from another culture, the reader is required to have at least some knowledge of persons, places, or events from that other culture. Some names will be universally known, such as New York or Angela Merkel, but others will be mostly unknown and perhaps even mysterious, such as Monnikendam or Meneer Beerta. We could therefore ask the question of how “international” a work of fiction actually is.
MuSeUM (2006 — 2010)
Project website: MuSeUM
The MuSeUM project addresses the prototypical problem of a cultural heritage institution with the ambition to disclose all of its content in a single, unified system. The institution has various legacy systems, each dealing with a small part of the collection, each constructed for different purposes, in different times, by different people, working in different traditions, based on different design principles, with different access methods, etcetera. In short, the cultural heritage institution is confronted with its own history.