DH@VU has very successfully attracted funding from EU and national science foundations. In most projects we collaborate with private and public partners, e.g. IBM, Lexis Nexis, IENS, Digibron, Rijksmuseum, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, UBVU, Olery, Booking.com, Underlined, Synerscope, 2CoolMonkeys, Van Dale, KLM, etc.
VU also offers students the opportunity to be schooled as digital humanities scholars through a Digital Humanities Minor (collaboration with UvA) and Digital Humanities/Linguistic Engineering master and graduate programs.
Text and social analytics
We focus on modeling understanding of social and historical processes and natural language through:
- Advanced text mining technology that is used to automatically extract knowledge and information from text – ranging from simple statements and facts, to events, concepts, storylines, and perspectives, e.g. opinions or emotions. And ranging from in-depth quality analysis to long term concept mining.
Projects: Newsreader, Biographynet, QuPiD2 (AAA Data Science), Embodied Emotions, Digibron, Reading between the lines, and the VU-Spinoza projects Understanding Language by Machines.
- Social analytics focusing on the dynamic relations between (groups of) individuals, their actions, opinions, and perceptions, as well as on the social implications of these dynamics.
Projects: AMCAT, Smart Governance, RISIS, Crowd funding
Linked Data, Web Science and Digital Hermeneutics
VU has prominent expertise in the field of (Semantic) Web Science. We investigate modelling and representation of different forms of knowledge, develop innovative crowd sourcing systems, help to improve search systems and critically research the hermeneutics of data representation.
Projects: CLARIAH, Data2Semantics (COMMIT), Accurator (COMMIT), INVENIT, ControCurator, Agora, Dive+, ARIADNE (Spinlab)
Spatial modelling and data visualization.
Access to large, multimodal/multiscalar? data sets has created both challenges and opportunities. New modelling and visualization tools are required that can cater directly for the needs of Humanities and Social Scientists. At VU we develop new strategies for modelling and visualizing spatio-temporal information, for interactive discovery of meaning across time, and integrating multiple modalities in data representation. Projects: Visualizing Uncertainty (EScience), HERCULES, Mapping the Via Appia, Challenging Testaccio (Spinlab/Archaeology), Finding the limits of the Limes, Portable Antiquities of the Netherlands, Sea and Land Routes in Southern Euboia (Archeology), Mapping Slavery.
