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…

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…

Utrecht University presents its new vision on Recognition and Rewards in a series of videos. Our developers Luka van der Plas, Berit Janssen and head of DH-IT Andre van Kooij explain in this video how the Digital Humanities Lab (DHLab) fulfills a unique hybrid role between academics and support staff. The scientific developers of the DHLab develop…

Iris Muis has just returned from a trip to the European Parliament, where she presented the Fundamental Rights & Algorithms Impact Assessment (FRAIA) together with Mirko Schäfer from Data School. Muis: ‘Organizations are increasingly using algorithms to make work more efficient and to hire fewer people. But if you use technology, you also have a…

This year’s theme of the ECREA (European Communication Research and Education Association) 2022 conference in Denmark is ‘Rethink Impact’. The organization of the conference interviewed Mirko Schäfer on this theme. Schäfer is cofounder and Faculty of Science Lead of the Utrecht Data School and Associate Professor at UU. Read the interview here.

Joint programming in Python, the best place for hybrid meetings and fiddling with screens and microphones. The Living Lab Digital Humanities, a collaboration of the University Library and the Centre for Digital Humanities, was launched a year ago. Who uses this ‘workshop’ for digital research and education? What can you do there and what could be…

During her research into the term ‘Anthropocene’ for her bachelor’s thesis in history, Suzanne Ros discovered that the subject was much larger than she had expected. She decided to dive into digital methods that could help her with her analysis, and she taught herself Python through YouTube videos. Successfully. She won the recently created thesis…

Since the summer, Prof. dr. Rens van de Schoot has been making weekly use of the Living Lab Digital Humanities in the Utrecht University Library City Centre with his Automated Systematic Review group (ASReview group). He talks about the added value of the Living Lab DH, working during the lockdown and expectations for the future. The Living…

What do English readers expect from translated literature? And how about the Dutch? Professor Haidee Kotze and her research team used big data to look for patterns in the way that ordinary readers review translated literature. Together with the Digital Humanities Lab they developed DIOPTRA-L, a corpus with 280.000 reviews of more than 150 books…

The Utrecht Digital Humanities Lab will collaborate with the University of Jyväskylä (Finland) on the political-historical research project ‘People and Parliament’. This collaboration between software developers and historians enables groundbreaking research into parliamentary data. ‘People and Parliament’ is an ambitious project. The research focuses on the use of political language in the national parliaments of…

On the 20th of May, the Living Lab Digital Humanities will open in the University Library City Centre. Prof. Dr. Hugo Quené, Professor of Quantitative Methods of Empirical Research in the Humanities, talks about this cooperation between the Centre for Digital Humanities and the library. What is the Living Lab Digital Humanities?The Living Lab Digital Humanities will be a…