The Fryske Akademy

The Fryske Akademy carries out fundamental and applied research in the fields of the Frisian language, history and culture. Its research is based on the natural laboratory offered by the region’s past and present. The results carry scientific as well as social meaning.

An important task of the Fryske Akademy is to provide (digital) access to the historical and linguistic heritage of Fryslân.

Projects linked to eHumanities

HISGIS: Historical GIS

The goal is to create a knowledge infrastructure for the collation, analysis and presentation of historical geo-data for The Netherlands to enable access to historical spatial data from the period 1500-2000.

The core and basis was the development of such an infrastructure for Fryslân.

HISGIS enables the user to combine in multiple ways data from different periods and different themes. It will become a versatile research platform and geo-toolkit for all disciplines of history at every spatial geographic level in The Netherlands.

IFLD: Integrated Frisian Language Database

The goal is to provide easy access to text written in Frisian as well to Frisian speech from the past, present and future and to create a research tool for synchronic and diachronic linguistic and lexicological research, text edition, history, literature and law.

The database will contain all preserved texts written between approximately 1200 and 1900, and most of the materials written afterwards. New challenges are the data available on the social media, contemporary spoken material and the integration of old dialect data.

FAME!: Frisian Audio Mining Enterprise

In this project (in collaboration with Radboud University Nijmegen) we will disclose 2600 hours of radio broadcasts from Omrop Fryslân from the period 1950-2015, containing spoken Frisian and Dutch.

We will use speech technology for spoken document retrieval (speech to text conversion) and for speaker tracking (speaker diarization & recognition).