Affiliated member Pim Huijnen awarded by eScience Center

The project of Pim Huijnen, affiliated member of the Centre for Digital Humanities, was approved by the Netherlands eScience Center. In April of this year, he will start the two-year project for which the eScience Center will build cutting-edge research software.

The Netherlands eScience Center has set out this open call to help researchers from different research fields to build research software to help them solve fundamental research questions. They awarded 25 innovative projects to benefit from their cutting-edge research software. These projects range from personalized cancer vaccine design, to estimating motion of objects on Earth from space, to automatically analyzing court decisions.

The semantics of sustainability

Pim Huijnen’s project The Semantics of Sustainability. Historicizing language models to study the conceptual history of sustainability in the Netherlands uses state-of-the-art machine learning techniques to study conceptual change over time. It builds on the seminal BERT infrastructure that has, in recent years, caused a breakthrough in the computational understanding of language. With the help of the Dutch National Library’s massive archive of historical newspapers, magazines and books, it is possible to show how Dutch words have changed their meaning and connotation in public discourse from the Second World War until the present day. The project aims to study the conceptual history of one of the most urgent issues of today: global sustainability.