Past, Present and Future of Digital Humanities & Social Sciences in the Netherlands

Join us on 20 May at the KNAW in Amsterdam to consider the past and future of digital humanities and social sciences in the Netherlands.

During the morning, we will showcase four Computational Humanities projects – The Riddle of Literary Quality; Elite Network Shifts During Regime Change in Indonesia; Tunes and Tales, Modeling Oral Transmission; and CEDAR, Dutch Census Data in a Web of Cultural and Historic Information.  These projects form the core of the KNAW’s Computational Humanities programme, 2011-16, which brought together computer and information scientists from the universities with scholars in the humanities and social sciences institutes of the KNAW to develop new tools and methods for gathering, storing, searching, processing, analyzing and representing data and sources.

The morning will be opened by Sally Wyatt, Programme Leader of the eHumanities group, and Theo Mulder, Director of the KNAW Research Institutes. Each of the projects will then present key results and demonstrate the data and tools they have developed. The focus will be on the legacy of the projects for the wider community, not only researchers but also other possible users.

This is not the end of the involvement of the KNAW in digital humanities and social sciences. In the afternoon, we will launch CHAT-NL (Netherlands Centre for Humanities and Technology), a national platform to promote future research in this flourishing field, bringing together many universities, KNAW institutes and others. José van Dijck, President of the KNAW, will open the afternoon proceedings, and will formally launch CHAT-NL.

Two prominent DH scholars will provide keynote lectures – Ray Siemens, Canada Research Chair in Computational Humanities at the University of Victoria, and Franciska de Jong, Professor of e-Research for the Humanities at Utrecht University. The afternoon will also include demonstrations by local start-ups and others involved in making DH more widely available.

Please find  the full programme and abstracts here

Register now for what promises to be an exciting day of discussion, debate and demonstration about what the digital means for the future of humanities and social science research.