Centre for Digital Humanities

Interviews

SURF interview: prof. dr. Antal van den Bosch on AI and GPT-NL

Prof. dr. Antal van den Bosch has given an interview to SURF, the cooperative association of Dutch educational and research institutions. The interview is titled ‘AI lets scientists work magic with language’. In the interview, he speaks about his career in AI and his thoughts on the future of AI. He also shares his ideas…

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UU interview: Core team Human Artificial Intelligence

An interview with Dr. Pim Huijnen and Dr. Evelyn Wan has been published on Intranet, the internal website for Utrecht University staff. Together with Dr. Tejaswini Deoskar and Dr. Dominik Klein, Pim and Evelyn make up the core team Human Artificial Intelligence. The interview is part of the series: ‘educational innovation through the eyes of the four…

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Interview with Karin van Es and Dennis Nguyen: Exploring the potential of data donations

Data donation presents a new and unique approach to collecting digital trace data, liberating researchers from platform dependencies and restrictions. A consortium of six Dutch universities has now started building its own digital data donation infrastructure. Within this initiative, Karin van Es and Dennis Nguyen from the Faculty of Humanities at Utrecht University, supported by…

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Interview Lorena De Vita: Using Transkribus to decrypt the diaries of a German jurist

During her research Lorena De Vita stumbled upon the personal diaries, spanning from 1932 to 1989, of Otto Küster, a German jurist who dedicated a significant portion of his professional career seeking reparations for Holocaust survivors. His handwriting, however, was almost illegible. De Vita participated in a Trankskribus workshop offered by the UB and CDH…

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Data School on impact: ‘We want to take part in shaping the digital society’

Data School’s Mirko Schäfer and Iris Muis are keen to push for a broader definition of impact at university level. Although they do not find the time to publish as often as they would like, their research is having significant impact, with their work used in Austria, Sweden, Finland and Greece. Schäfer: ‘If you really want to achieve an impact,…

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FAIR Research IT interview with Berit Janssen

This interview is part of a series conducted by UU FAIR research IT, aimed at showcasing the impact of their projects on FAIR research IT. This TextMiNER project, led by the CDH Research Software Lab, has been made possible through a FAIR Research IT Innovation Grant. ‘You get much more out of a text corpus with…

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Historical fortress wall discovered in man’s backyard using ‘georeferenced’ map from Utrecht University

Dutch version of this article. While deepening a pond in his garden, Erwin Jesterhoudt from the Zeeland village of Philippine, stumbled upon a piece of an old wall in early October. Using a digital historical map from Utrecht University, he learned that it was a section of an 18th-century fortress wall. The Centre for Digital…

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Stories from the Lab: AI & Media Lab – Beyond the frenzy of the day

The AI & Media Lab, a cooperation between Utrecht University, HU University of Applied Sciences Utrecht and Media Perspectives, works on exploring AI applications in the media and the gaming world. Operating under the umbrella of AI Labs, it actively collaborates with a varied network of partners from the IT sector and creative industry. In…

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Interview with Jeroen Bakker and Sander Prins: A simple way of harvesting and analyzing social media data with 4CAT

In this series of interviews the FAIR Research IT Innovation Fund shows what contribution projects can make to FAIR research IT. The research teams of the projects have received a grant from them. Good news for scientists whose technological skills are limited, but who want to work with social media data in their research: now…

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Interview Jeroen Salman: “The network allows researchers to learn about each other’s expertise”

Between 2016 and 2018, Jeroen Salman led the EDPOP project. What digital techniques has he used in the project? What role did Utrecht University Library and the Research Software Lab of the Centre for Digital Humanities (CDH) play in EDPOP? And are such roles ever played out? The EDPOP project (European Dimensions of popular print culture) is…

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Interview with Edo Storm, winner of the Digital History Thesis Award 2023

Edo Storm used a combination of computational methods and close reading to conduct research into the history of the term ‘the West’. It earned him this year’s Digital History Thesis Award. Storm: ‘I wouldn’t have seen the big overarching narrative without this computational method.’ Fellow students sometimes joked about him and his ‘digital stuff’ when…

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CDH Interview: How did we perceive animals and plants in the Netherlands over the past centuries? Language model GysBERT assists with mapping it out

How did a sixteenth-century Dutch inhabitant experience the animals and plants around him? And how did that change in the centuries that followed? When did the rabbit change from food into pet and the horse from means of transportation into pleasure animal? Literary texts, scientific texts and folk tales, in particular, offer a unique glimpse…

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