The Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands is a humanities laboratory in which we develop, test and apply new methods in order to extract more and different information from the sources than has been possible until now. That represents a new approach within the humanities.
The Huygens ING wishes to pose new research questions, provide better answers to old ones, and to underpin the answers with much more data. We build and retrieve large bodies of text and datasets with hundreds of thousands of records. We ourselves develop the tools that are required for our research projects. With this quest for new paths, we are contributing to the innovation of Dutch and international humanities. In terms of content, we are primarily interested in the historical development of institutions, science and literature.
The analytical research of Huygens ING is closely related to the sources, and many of our projects produce editions of historical text and other sources. Examples are the (digital) edition of the correspondence of Vincent van Gogh or of the writings and letters of Piet Mondriaan, or Bioport, a website with currently more than 70,000 biographical portraits of Dutch notables from several centuries. As we see it, modern research in the humanities produces more than the common monographs, collections and scientific articles: we construct websites, (enriched) corpora, databases, source publications, text editions and digital research tools.
The contact person is Joris van Zundert