The DH Clinics are our attempt of spreading the DH-word amongst our Dutch colleagues. We wanted to set up a community of librarians who were involved in DH, in order to learn from each other and discuss new methods and initiatives. However, we soon learned that a lot of academic libraries in the Netherlands were still thinking about DH and how to implement it in their organisations. We’re speaking early 2015 now and luckily, a lot has happened since, but we believe a small impulse is needed to speed everything along.

And that is why we are now organising DH Clinics for Dutch academic librarians (and possibily also some archivists). The idea of the clinics is that we tackle several major themes of DH over six full-day sessions. The mornings are dedicated to lectures about the theme (think of, for example, text and data mining) and are open to a public that is interested in DH. In the afternoon, we’ll have hands-on workshops with specific applications. This part of the session is meant for people who are actually working with DH researchers, or want to do so.

We’re not setting out to re-train librarians into programmers or data crunchers, but we do want to provide them with the basics of DH with which they should increase their knowledge level to such an extent that they are able to follow the (online) discussions in the field, give tips to beginning researchers, perhaps even use some of the tools for their own work and ideally to engage with the very rich online content to learn more, such as The Programming Historian or Library Carpentry (both of which are used as inspiration for our clinics).

We’re developing the clinics with the Working Out Loud-principles, which means we will regularly share what we are doing and invite you to comment on it. Since we’re working together with the VU and UBL, this blog is not the only one you should keep an eye on, but we’ll announce everything via Twitter as well, so if you’re not already following us, now is the perfect time to start! @KBNLresearch

We want to thank all researchers for their interesting proposals, wish them all the best for 2016 and hope to see them again in a following year!

Milan van Lange – Emotional recollections and World War Two resistance: political, press and personal language about (the history of) war-time resistance in the Netherlands since 1940.

Seventy years after liberation, World War Two remains a seemingly inexhaustible source of stories, a political instrument, and a cornerstone in Dutch societal self-consciousness. From the early post-war years onwards, Resistance has been a focal aspect in recollecting and instrumentalizing the war.

This project aims to gain new insights in the ways in which the Dutch resistance is remembered, specifically the extent to which such recollections take the form of emotional and/or subjective language. Current literature implicitly show emotions around war and resistance. While in historiography emphasis lies on the memory of war, a more explicit focus on the publicly and privately ventured assumptions, feelings and understandings is lacking. With this project I want to subject the often implicitly emotional views in both the public (parliamentary discussions, press) and private sphere (letters) to a critical reassessment and to propose a methodology for systematic investigation of emotional language and expressions in reference to past events.

A key question is how emotional recollections were expressed, over time, in politics, media and in personal testimony. This links up with current research into the use of concepts as trauma, guilt, honor, heroism, adventurism or dignity. Focus will lie on the interrelatedness of emotional recollections (in private letters) and so-called ‘liminal points’ in public debates. These points could be described as for instance scandals or controversial publications that initiated a change or turning point in attitudes connected to resistance.

As historians, we will never be able to feel precisely what contemporaries felt in the past. Only emotions that were expressed and registered had a chance to be transmitted to the present. Thus, to investigate emotions and how they changed we have to look for traces of those expressions. These recordings can be found in various places: in political debates, in media and in private expressions.

Fragmented Empire: Dutch Popular Imperialism around the Turn of the Twentieth Century

In my PhD project, I approach the metropolitan imperial culture in The Netherlands ‘from below’: not as constituted by politics or science, but as it was formed in popular imagination and in daily life. By turning from elite-actors to civil society at large, I aim at showing that popular imperialism was not made up of a single block. The various case studies (mission festivals, Indies food culture, Scouting, etc.) show that highly heterogeneous groups displayed a wide variety of interests in empire, without engaging much (if ever) with each other. Moreover, their interests in colonialism did not always coincide with official aims. It resulted in a fragmented imperialism where no strong, over-arching imperial identity developed. For this reason, some elements of Dutch imperial culture are easily overlooked by historians, as these ‘fragments’ are sometimes hiding in unsuspected places. On the other hand, the influence of Dutch imperial culture is at times overestimated, as the same ‘fragments’ can be presented as part of a larger imperial culture, which I argue they were not. This approach leaves room for the wide variety of ways the Dutch public related to their empire, from zealous support to negation and from indifference to intensive engagement.

In search of no more noise in search

The utility of digital resources such as Delpher can be considerably improved by removing noise from the search results, which is possibly by addressing digitization issues as well as enrichment of the material with semantic information. For Delpher, digitization issues include the missing separation of newspaper pages into articles, correctly identifying column borders, dealing with mark-up peculiarities such as margin text and graphical elements, or signaling possible digitization errors to be taken into account in further processing. Enrichment can be envisioned, for example, as classification of content into core news items and secondary matters, assigning domain labels to news reports, providing a summary of who interacts with what, and finding similar articles based on the semantic enrichment information. Given the size of the Delpher database, all processing should be performed automatically. This can be achieved using a combination of existing tools and newly developed algorithms incorporating and extending recent advances in natural language processing research. The processed database will be more useful for academic researchers looking for a comprehensive collection of relevant sources for their research questions, as well as the general public trying to find articles that fit their interest in a fast and convenient way. Moreover, methods or resources created for this specific database may prove to be valuable for a broader range of sources, in and outside of the Royal Library.

Keepers of the Master’s House: tracing librarianship through digital collections

Libraries have historically and institutionally been complicit with disciplinary, oppressive systems such as imperialism and patriarchy. The core activities of librarianship – selection, preservation, classification, dissemination – are fundamentally normalizing and marginalizing practices. Previous critical engagements with the power dynamics of library cataloging systems such as LCC and DDS suggest that such systems reproduce or even coproduce power differentials, including gender difference (cf. Hope A. Olson, 2001).  But the library is also gendered at a more concrete level. When librarianship became a feminized profession it lost some of its previous regard as an intellectual profession and became regarded as an administrative profession. In the cultural imaginary, female librarians were the keepers of the master’s house – no less, but certainly no more.

Using the KB digital collections of magazines, newspapers and policy papers this research project traces transformations in librarianship from the late 19th to the early 21st century on two levels. Firstly, by tracing how thinking about librarianship with regards to different media (print, audio, visual, digital) changed. Secondly, by tracing how the material labor of embodied librarians changed. In search of the hybrid human-technological forms of librarianship that have emerged through different technosocial instantiations of the KB, the research will engage with discourses and metaphors as well as matter and practices in search of an account of librarianship as scientific and cultural, always already political, embodied and technological knowledge practice.

Mapping political movements. Constructing a tool to map abolitionism in the three Northern provinces

In this project a tool will be constructed to assist historians and social scientists in researching the geographic scope of political movements in the Netherlands from the nineteenth century onwards. By making use of the sources available through Delpher, and possibly the Nieuw Nederlandsch Biografisch Woordenboek annotated maps are created that provide insight into where what activities were undertaken by different organisations, making it possible to compare their geographic reach. The central case study is that of abolitionism in the three Northern provinces of the Netherlands in the early nineteenth century. In the period 1840 to 1863 abolitionist campaigned for the abolition of slavery in the Dutch colonies. Maartje Janse (2007) has characterised abolitionism as a protest movement focused on changing the public opinion on slavery. She argued that these and other non-Parliamentary protest groups founded in this period – like the movement for the abolishment of alcohol consumption – prepared the way for the political parties that would be founded from the end of the nineteenth century. The tool that is to be developed will show the temporal and geographic scope of the activities of these non-Parliamentary pressure groups, but also assist in studying the non-Parliamentary activities of political parties. Thereby this tool provides opportunities for research that go beyond the possibilities offered through the app ‘Hier was het nieuws’ and the N-gram viewer. By assisting researchers in localizing non-Parliamentary political activities this tool will be of interest to many historians and social scientists interested in politics beyond the institutions and in political culture. The tool will enable researchers to find patterns and connections that might have remained unknown otherwise, or would cost an individual researcher months of work.

Mapping the Dutch Sociable world 1750-1800

Between 1750 and 1800, the Dutch Republic saw the extraordinary growth of what has been called ‘the sociable world’. Newly established societies, clubs, and Masonic lodges were creating opportunities for men to meet and pursue shared goals ranging from the encouragement of the arts in the 1760s to the overthrowing of city governments during the Patriottentijd. Because they left records of their activities and membership, these societies are treasure troves of information about many important historical developments in the Dutch 18th century. Unsurprisingly, countless historians have relied on archival material generated by these societies to write histories of literature, science, music, politics, and more.

As a researcher in residence, I intend to demonstrate how digital humanities methodology can use these treasures for new forms of research. I will do so by using my database, generated by my PhD-project, of nearly 14.000 individuals who were societies during the second half of the eighteenth century. This database has already proved its uses. By identifying the religious backgrounds of these individuals, I have been able to map the increasing presence of Catholics gained in to sociable gatherings from the 1770’s onwards.

At the KB, I will use the database for an even more ambitious purpose. I intend to show how societies and their individual members affected Dutch society at large, by systematically searching the KB’s digital collections for activities that involved the sociably active individuals in my database. To this end, I will develop a digital tool that will mine the KB’s collections (such as Delpher.nl) and arrange the results to allow network analysis and the use of graphic mapping software. Thus, the tool can show many connections between the societies and developments in the world at large, while revealing networks of musicians, scientists, politicians, noblemen, and more.

Topic Models of large document collections

Humanities researchers and literary scholars commonly struggle to make sense and extract information from patterns in large document collections. Computational techniques for finding similarities between documents in such collections continue to be developed and are invaluable in understanding these collections as single entities.

Topic modelling is a text processing tool widely used to identify structure in document collections. It has been successfully used for a wide range of applications. However it suffers from weaknesses which make it difficult to use and may lead to unreliable results:

+It is dependent on preprocessing for removal of stopwords and other text features: this is a common first step on many NLP applications; results produced are highly dependent on the quality of the selection at this stage

+Number of topics typically needs to be determined a-priori: ideally the number of topics could be inferred from the data itself

+Interpretation of resulting topics is difficult: topics are normally represented by a set of most representative words for the topic, but these words do not relate directly to human experience

+Visualization of produced topics is not intuitive: the optimal way of visualizing topics is current area of active research

+Incorporating additional dimensions to a model (e.g. evolution of topics over time) is a feature which is not easily incorporated

+Topic models scale poorly for large document collections: this is mainly due to the computational complexity of the algorithm

Several efforts have been made to overcome such limitations with limited success. However solutions to these issues are not yet common practice and require additional knowledge and effort in order to take full advantage of them.

The aim of this project is to develop topic modelling tools which can help humanities researchers and literary scholars to make sense of large document collections without requiring extensive expertise in tuning model parameters.

Uncovering cultural agendas: a digital instrument for collecting and analyzing information about cultural events in the past

The project proposes to design and test a prototype of a digital research instrument that allows for collecting, storing and analyzing information about public performances in cinemas, theatres and concert halls in the past. Detailed information about cultural events is amply available in the cultural agendas of local newspapers which were published across the country throughout the twentieth century. What is missing is an instrument for intersectoral and interregional comparison in order to better understand the dissemination of repertoire as it travels across space and time in order to meet its audience.

The instrument has to fulfill two requirements. First, it is to extract information from cultural agendas (weekly overviews of cultural events taking place in a given place) from digitized newspapers. Second, it has to be able to store, edit and query the collected data in a relational system based on a proper data model.

Within the proposed project a basic data model will be designed, which accommodates the commonalities of the different agendas, such as date, venue and title of the performance or screening. Later, the data model should be extended and refined to cover core components of the cultural infrastructure and the relationships between them, including locations, people, companies, performances and artistic works.

Based on the data model an instrument in form of a relational database will be designed. Prior research experience has shown that existing information management systems and database structures are not sufficient to grasp the complexity of cultural historical data and to make it possible to analyze patterns and networks. Cinema Context, the online database for the study of film culture in the Netherlands, may serve as an inspiration for designing the proposed data model and research tool.

Unlocking the STCN

The aim of the project is to use the Short-Title Catalogue, Netherlands (STCN) as an instrument for an easy to use tool to visualize trends in the history of the book in the sixteenth and seventeenth century.

The STCN is the national bibliography of the Dutch printed book up to the year 1800. It’s a catalogue with over 204.000 titles. But the STCN is more than a catalogue. It is an overview of the printed book in the sixteenth and seventeenth century in the Netherlands. An overview in which all sorts of data lies hidden which can give us insight in how the book changed in these centuries. The STCN is available online, but would benefit from an additional ways to consult it’s underlying data to gain insight in larger trends.

In the proposed project, the STCN will be used to create an accessible dataset and a tool for researchers, students and other interested parties. This tool will be an easy accessible platform in which the user can find information about trends in the printed book.

The tool provides users the option to combine variables to answer questions in just a few clicks.

The platform can be used to display information visually, in charts or plots. For example, it can be used to show changes in the book in a specific genre, a defined decade or the most active printer or author based on location or year.

It is possible to use the STCN as a research tool via the Advanced Search function, but this often comes down to tallying. Recently it has become possible to answer questions based on the STCN with the help of the RDF query language SPARQL. However, this is a difficult language to master for occasional users.

This digital humanities project will increase the potential of the STCN. The STCN data will be retrieved and made visually available in a tool. By presenting the data graphically, the STCN is more serviceable for research. Trends and changes in the book which now has to be dug out the STCN, will soon be just a few clicks away.

More fundamentally, the aim of the research is to investigate the potential for producing digitally situated knowledges that can counter universalizing knowledge claims by making institutionalized, gendered labor a visible knowledge practice.

 

So, which two projects will we be focusing on in 2016?

Our first semester will be one of literature! We will be working together with Puck Wildschut (RU) on her project “Roles, relations and references: Towards a computation-based distant reading of narrative-semantic roles in large datasets in Dutch”. She submitted the following abstract:

Once upon a time…
A linguist e-mailed a literary scholar at RU Nijmegen. The linguist wondered whether formalist-structuralist actantial models were actually reflected in the language of fairytales. The literary scholar thought this to be a question of great relevance: if fairytales do all have the same basic set-up in terms of narrative roles, as Propp and Greimas claim, then one should expect this to show up not only on the higher narrative level of motive- and theme-building, but also on the linguistic level of semantic roles. And so began our protagonists’ quest for evidence: Aided by two more researchers, they set about the task of manually annotating many English and Dutch Grimm-fairytales.

Alas, they and their trustworthy computer-companion found that no actantial models were found in the fairytales’ language using a top-down approach. Instead of wallowing in despair, however, they decided to opt for a bottom-up approach, to see if the narrative-semantic roles and their relationships could be adequately processed by a computer. This effort yielded promising results: correspondences between different semantic roles in different fairytales were located, as well as similar relationships between those roles, based in part on verb-types. The researchers were very happy with this outcome and started on writing papers right away.

However, they felt a lot more could be done with the acquired insights: their semantic role analysis could also be of value for analyzing and understanding character-relationships in narrative texts in other genres. So no happily ever after yet, but this could all change if the literary scholar could go on a new quest as researcher in residence at the KB, in order to create a computation-based model for analyzing narrative-semantic roles and their relations, ready for use for researchers wanting to analyze character-relations and -development in large datasets in Dutch.

And during the second six months of 2016, we’re looking at newspapers again. This popular data set will be the focus point of the project of Dr. Frank Harbers (RUG) named “Discerning Journalistic Styles. Exploring Automated Analysis of Journalism’s Modes of Expression”. So, what does that entail?

The ‘age of abundance’ of historical newspaper material poses new challenges to historical research. Historical approaches to selecting and analyzing newspapers, rooted in the assumption of a scarcity of available material, had to be replaced with social scientific methods (Nicholson 2013; Broersma 2009). Yet, these manual quantitative methods are still highly time consuming and can only cover a small part of the available material (Harbers 2014). Automated analysis could potentially alleviate this issue. However, although they have a great appeal to researchers (Allen, Waldstein & Zhu 2008; Grimmer & Stewart 2013), such research is mostly done in information science and linguistics. It seldom has a press historical perspective (Broersma 2009; Arbesman 2013). Moreover, the emphasis has mostly been on topical modeling (Lee & Myaeng 2002), whereas attention for automatic classification of style and genre is scarce. More attention is beneficial for a range of research fields, as it gains insight in the mode of expression of the newspapers and sheds light on the discursive context (Handford 2010).

The DJS-project aims to 1) connect existing metadata from a large-scale manual content analysis of three Dutch newspapers, to the corresponding digitized articles in Delpher to subsequently 2) explore the possibilities of automating the analysis of the historical development (1880s-1930s) of journalistic style through (supervised/validated) machine learning, focusing on the classification of genre as an indicator of style (Grimmer & Stewart 2013; Ikonomakis, Kotsiantis & Tampakas 2005). It follows up on the NWO funded research project into the historical development of journalistic styles (1880-2005) (VIDI project Broersma, 2008-2013). Furthermore, DJS also functions as a pilot for a larger research proposal into automatic classification of newspapers styles, which I intend to write with Prof. Broersma.

The VIDI research entails a manual quantitative content analysis of 9 newspapers in 3 countries (NL, GB, FR). This has resulted in a database with coded metadata about 105000 articles (ca. 33000 Dutch articles) in 6 sample years (2 constructed weeks for each of the 9 dailies in 1885, 1905, 1925, 1965, 1985, 2005). The articles were coded for a range of manifest and latent variables (size, sourcing, topic, genre, author, images) to map the nuances of a general shift from a reflective reporting style to an event-centered style (Harbers 2014).

We are looking forward to working with these two researchers and want to thank all submitters for their proposals. We do hope to see a lot of you again in a following year and wish you all the best for 2016!

If you have any questions about the projects or programme, feel free to contact us below or via dh@kb.nl. All other abstracts will be posted in a separate blog post later this week.

We are able to extend the deadline for your submission for the KB Researcher-in-residence with a week. That means you don’t have to work this weekend to get your proposal in order, but you can leave that until 8 November!

If you have any questions or would like to discuss your proposal, feel free to contact us at dh@kb.nl.

Read the full Call, Terms & Conditions and FAQ for more information.

Date: Friday October 30^th 2015, 12.00 – 17.00 Location: National Library of the Netherlands in The Hague (KB), auditorium

The Talk of Europe – Travelling CLARIN Campus project aims to facilitate and stimulate pan-European collaboration in the Humanities, Social Sciences and Computer Science, based on the proceedings of the European Parliament (EP) by organising three international creative camps in 2014 and 2015. These proceedings are a rich source for humanities and social sciences researchers that focus on areas such as European History, integration and politics. Given their multilinguality they are also a rich source for linguists. The Talk of Europe (TOE) project team has made these proceeding available as Linked Data for reuse and research purposes. The creative camps intend to stimulate and explore this rich source by bringing together academics from the humanities, social sciences, computer science and related disciplines. The Talk of Europe project, an initiative of CLARIN ERIC and CLARIN-NL made possible by NWO and OCW support is a collaboration of the Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR), VU University Amsterdam (VUA), National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI), DANS and Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (NISV).
For more information, see: http://www.talkofeurope.eu/

The third and final Creative Camp will be organised from 26 – 30 October 2015 at the National Library of the Netherlands in The Hague. On Friday, October 30^th a free public symposium will be held, titled ‘Open Data for the Social Sciences and Humanities’. All those interested are invited to attend. Participants can look forward to the following invited talks, which are sure to inspire and ignite discussion and debate:

12.00-13.00         Lunch buffet

13.00-13.45        ‘Measuring Political and Social Phenomena on the Web’
Presentation by prof. dr. Markus Strohmaier

Markus Strohmaier is a Full Professor of Web-Science at the Faculty of Computer Science at University of Koblenz-Landau, Scientific Director of the Computational Social Science department at GESIS – the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences. His main research interests include Web-Science, Social and Semantic Computing, Social Software Engineering, Networks and Data Mining.

See: http://markusstrohmaier.info/

14.00-14.45       Presentations by two teams participating in Talk of Europe                                   Creative Camp #3

15.00-15.30       ‘Who killed whom in the Gaza war? Using syntactic information for relational corpus analysis’
Presentation by Wouter van Atteveldt and Kasper Welbers

Wouter van Atteveldt is assistant professor at the VU University of Amsterdam, department of Communication Sciences. He studies political communication, especially the antecedents and consequences of mass media coverage of political discourse. His research has a strong methodological focus on using AI / Computational NLP techniques to improve automatic text (content) analysis. For more information, see: http://vanatteveldt.com/

Kasper Welbers works at the VU University of Amsterdam as a PhD candidate. In his research he focuses on the changes in the gatekeeping process due to the proliferation of digital media technologies. Specifically, he studies the interaction between gatekeepers, by using automatic content analysis to trace news diffusion patterns.

15.30-16.00         Presentation by Maarten Brinkerink 

Maarten Brinkerink is Specialist Public Participation and Innovative Access for the Department of Knowledge and Innovation at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. He coordinates the contribution of the institute in (inter) national research projects a
nd contributes to its strategic policy. Brinkerink strengthens the wider heritage sector by participating in initiatives such as Open Data and Culture Network Digital Heritage.
For more information, see: http://www.beeldengeluid.nl/en/kennis/experts/maarten-brinkerink

15.45-16.30       Drinks

There is no charge for this symposium (lunch included), but registration is requested. If you would like to attend the event, please send a short message to Jill Briggeman (briggeman@eshcc.eur.nl).
For more information, see: http://www.talkofeurope.eu/2015/10/symposium-announcement/

Address National Library (auditorium):
Prins Willem-Alexanderhof  5
2595 BE The Hague
Directions can be found here: https://www.kb.nl/en/visitors/address-and-directions

The KB and digitisation

The Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB), National Library of the Netherlands  is a research library with a broad collection in the fields of Dutch history, culture and society, and as a national library collects and stores all (digital) publications that appear in the Netherlands, as well as a part of the international publications about the Netherlands. The KB has planned to have digitised and OCRed its entire collection of books, periodicals and newspapers from 1470 onward by the year 2030. Already in 2013, 10% of this enormous task was completed, resulting in 73 million digitised pages, either from the KB itself or via public-private partnerships as Google Books and ProQuest. Over 1 million books, newspapers and magazines are currently available via the search portal www.delpher.nl.

Researcher-in-residence

The project will be carried out in the Research Department of the KB and there will be two consecutive placements in 2016.

Who are we looking for?

Early career researchers who are:

• PhD-students or have obtained their PhD between 2010 and 2015,
• Employed at a university or research institute in the EU,
• Interested in using one (or more) of the digital collections of the KB,
• Available for 0.5 fte over a period of 6 months (Jan – Jun 2016 or Jul – Dec 2016) and able to spend at least 1 day a week at the KB.

What can we offer you?

• A secondment with the KB,
• Access to all data sets of the KB,
• An office space,
• Travel costs within the Netherlands,
• Support from a programmer, collection and data specialists.

Which collections do we have?

You can use any digital collection of the KB and even combine it with an external collection, if copyright allows. Several of our digitised collections are described in more detail on our website, such as the parliamentary papers and the medieval illuminated manuscripts.

You can also browse through our collection of more than 1 million newspapers, magazines, radio bulletins and books on Delpher.nl.

What kind of projects are we looking for?

We’re open to all kinds of projects that use our data and benefit your research and other users of the KB and/or the KB Research Lab. Read our blog for more inspiration.

One of the previous Researchers-in-residence has worked on a best practice method for concept searching using keyword generation. Another team has worked on creating a data set that makes image similarity search a real possibility for all photos in our digitised historical newspapers.

For answer to more questions, read our FAQ. Please also read the terms of this call and placement. Respondents are urged to contact dh@kb.nl in advance of proposal submission to discuss eligibility, project details, prerequisites, and KB support with the Digital Humanities team.

How do I apply?

Fill out this form before 1 8 November 2015 to submit your project. Don’t forget to read the terms and conditions of this call and agree to them. You will be notified of the outcome in December.

I want to use my own dataset. Is that possible?
Sure! As long as you also use one of the sets of the KB and it doesn’t limit the publication of the project end results.

I don’t know how to code, is that a problem?
Not at all. We have skilled programmers who can help you with your project or we will try to find a match for you if you prefer someone else. This would mean submitting as a team and will cut the budget in half. Reach out to us to discuss the options.

I don’t speak Dutch. Is your content still interesting to me?
That depends on your research question It might not be so appealing to linguists, but could offer an novel collection for computer scientists. Contact us to see which collections we have and we can discuss what might be the most interesting set for you.

Why will you publish my proposal?
We want to show others what types of proposals we have received to offer future researchers an insight into the selection process and to prevent them from entering a similar project.

Can I submit a project I’ve submitted previously (at another institution)?
We’d like you to submit an original idea. It can be one you have had lying around for some time, but we’d appreciate projects that haven’t been done before. Projects that have been previously entered into a similar program should be changed significantly before resubmitting.

I want to use my own programmer, can I?
Yes, you can. We even encourage you to bring in extra people when you want to address a subject we’re not experts in (such as multimedia). However, the budget remains the same, so it will have to be split between you. We do ask that the whole team is available in the KB for at least one day a week. If you want to know whether we can help you or if you should bring someone in, please contact us at dh@kb.nl.

I don’t know if my idea is what you’re looking for. What can I do?
You are welcome to contact us at dh@kb.nl to discuss your ideas and the possibilities.

Can I submit more than one project?
Yes, you can submit as many as you like.

Who will be judging the entries?
The entries will be judged by an internal committee and then forwarded to an external committee of representative experts from several Dutch universities and institutions.

What will you judge my project on?
We will judge the entries on criteria such as feasibility (technically, legally and practically), how the KB data will be showcased and used and whether the end results are of use for a wider community. Next to this, we will also look at the originality and quality of the proposal and the amount of support needed (and in this case, more is not necessarily worse!).

What happens if you receive a plagiarized project?
That person or team will not be considered for placement. You are responsible for the originality and authenticity of the project, but we will keep our eyes open.

What happens to any software I write for my project?
All software in the projects, whether you or we write it, will be made available on the KB Research Lab and Github page under an open source license (at least GPLv3).

Can I publish any papers about the project?
Yes, of course. If necessary, we’re happy to help.

1. General
   1. If you enter the Programme you agree to abide by all of the following Terms and Conditions under which the Programme is run, and to be bound by them. We may disqualify you without prior notice if you are in breach of any of these Terms and Conditions.
   2. KB reserves the right to cancel the Programme at any stage if KB deems this necessary or circumstances arise that are outside of our control.

2. Entries
   1. The Programme is open to all excluding employees or contractors of the KB or their direct family members.
   2. The Programme is only open to Ph.D.-students, or applicants who have obtained a Ph.D.-degree between 2010 and 2015, and who are aged 18 years or older.
   3. The Programme is only open to EU-nationals employed by a university or a research institute within the EU.
   4. Entry is free.
   5. To enter the Programme, you must:
      1. Submit your proposal in accordance with the Call for proposals via the KB website; and
      2. Ensure that (i) your proposal is original (you can submit a proposal you have submitted previously as long as it has not been used in another programme or fellowship) and (ii) your proposal does not in any way infringe the copyright or other intellectual property rights, or other rights of any third party.
      3. Ensure that your proposal is aimed at the use of KB-data that benefits your research and other users of KB and/or the KB Research Lab.
      4. Tick the box to accept these Terms and Conditions when you submit your entry.
   6. All entries must be received by midnight on 8 November 2015. Any entries received after this will not be considered.
   7. The entries will be judged by an internal committee and then forwarded to an external committee of representatives experts from several Dutch universities and institutions.
   8. You may be contacted by email or telephone to answer further questions about your entry up to 15 December 2015. Two entries and two backup-entries will be chosen for the final stage. The best two entries will be contacted personally by email to assess whether those applicants are available for the secondment-period.

3. Rights and permissions
   1. All entrants accept and agree that KB may publish the title and abstract of your proposal on the KB Research Blog at the KB’s sole discretion by January 2016. This blog is harvested for the Dutch web archive.
   2. In the event that you are offered a secondment:
      1. you agree to enter in a written agreement with KB and the university or research institute where you are employed on, among other things, intellectual property rights, and the obligations of the parties concerned including the obligations as set out in these Terms and Conditions.
      2. you agree to: participate in any publicity planned by KB, if required;
      3. you will be expected to work on your project at least one day per week in residence at the KB in Den Haag, between 1 January 2016 and 30 June 2016 or 1 July 2016 and 31 December 2016, for 0.5 fte.
      4. you agree to present your research results to employees of the KB in the final month of your secondment.
      5. you will be expected to publish a blog about your project on the KB Research Blog.
      6. you agree to submit a Certificate of Conduct for Natural Persons (‘VOG NP’).
   3. If any software is produced for your research, it will be developed on the principles of open source software and it will be made available on the KB Research Lab and Github website under a GPLv3
   4. KB offers you access to all data sets of the KB and support from a programmer, collection specialists and data specialists.
   5. During the secondment, KB offers you an office space and payment of all travel expenses within the Netherlands regarding the secondment.
   6. In case you do not live in the Netherlands, you are responsible to find and fund your own housing and pay for travel expenses to the KB in Den Haag, the Netherlands.

4. Personal data
   1. Other than as expressly permitted by these Terms and Conditions, KB will only use your contact details for the purposes of administering this Programme, and will not publish them or provide them to anyone without your permission.
   2. You consent to KB holding and processing data relating to you for legal, administrative and management purposes.
   3. Any personal data relating to you will be used solely in accordance with the current data protection legislation in the Netherlands (Wet bescherming persoonsgegevens) and will not be disclosed to another party – except for the external committee of representatives experts from several Dutch universities and institutions – without your prior consent. Please see the Privacy statement KB for further details.
   4. Data relating to you will be retained by KB for a reasonable period after the closing date specified in clause 2.6 to assist in the administration of the Programme in a consistent manner and to deal with any queries on the Programme.

5. Applicable Law
   1. These Terms and Conditions and any dispute or claim arising out of or in connection with them shall be governed by and construed in accordance with Dutch law.
   2. The parties will attempt in good faith to resolve any dispute or claim arising out of or relating to these Terms and Conditions promptly by negotiation. If the dispute cannot be resolved by negotiation, you hereby agree that the sole jurisdiction and venue for any actions that may arise in relation to the subject matter hereof shall be the Dutch Court in Den Haag, the Netherlands.

All things must come to an end eventually – even the Europeana Newspapers project. The good news is that in every end, there is also a new beginning. But more on this later.

After 38 months of hard, but also very fun and rewarding work with our network, the project has officially come to a close in March 2015. But as usual with such endeavours, there are still many activities which go on beyond the lifetime of the project, such as reporting and reviewing, disseminating and spreading the results as well as fostering takeup and new initiatives around the use and exploitation of said outcomes.

And there are many valuable outcomes of the project – more than 20 million historic newspaper pages are now discoverable via Europeana, and close to 12 million pages are fully searchable in The European Library, thanks to the large-scale refinement work undertaken during the project. There are already some great examples of how this vast corpus can be utilised in research, or in the development of new services and applications. Nevertheless, with a collection of this size, the majority of it still needs to be explored and there are certainly many treasures buried within that yet remain to be discovered.

Europeana Newspapers has not only created a massive resource of easily accessible historical news, but also produced several handy tools for the exploitation and enrichement of digital newspapers, together with standards and best practices for collection holders that are aiming to provide their historical newspaper assets in similar ways.

Together, all these resources have really pushed the state-of-the-art of newspaper digitisation and presentation in Europe. And so here it comes: Europeana are already working on an exciting new development – a dedicated Europeana Newspaper channel will be launched in 2016! A new look and feel, more scalable servers, and possibly even more newspaper content are already in the pipeline. Make sure to follow us here and on social media to be amongst the first to hear about this.

Meanwhile, to encourage everyone to dive into all the rich resources delivered by Europeana Newspapers, we have summarised the main project results in a restyled special issue of our Final Report!

Harbour bridge, taken on our way to the conference opening at the State Library of NSW

My week started of with a workshop about the new version of Voyant, which makes it easier to run a standalone version of the tool. You do have all the nice applications that we’re all familiar with (if not, do check out the tool), but you have it installed on your own computer or server. Which is good for us, because that means we can run one on our lab! And that we can show you how everything works with our stuff! Do you want your own version? Download the package on their Github.

Tuesday was also the day that our current Researcher-in-residence, Martijn Kleppe, heard that the project Polimedia won a prize at the LODLAM Challenge, as we already posted about previously. That evening, we joined him at the State Library of NSW for the conference opening in the beautiful library near the Sydney harbour.

And on Wednesday, we could truly begin with some opening speeches, a keynote and a discussion on Twitter about gender imbalance. My highlight of the day however, was the presentation by @smiljana_a on organisational practices in DH centres. She interviewed a number of researchers and DH centre-employees about their experiences so far and wrote a book about it that will be published shortly. The main points for me from her talk where the role that a library can play in the Digital Humanities. We can help with teaching skills needed for DH or with information about tools and datasets. Luckily, that happens a lot already, but a small change like a ‘DH librarian’ could increase your collaboration with researchers a great deal!

And our newspapers were in the spotlight in the afternoon, when @melvinwevers talked about the work that they are doing in the project Translantis with our newspapers:

Melvin’s slides are available on Slideshare.

And then! Our poster!

Researcher-in-residence poster at DH2015.

We spoke to many great people. And I have to say that, while two years ago at DH2013, I hardly saw any librarians, at DH2015 they were there in abundance! We got to talk about our program and hope to have inspired other to also undertake a similar scheme and work together with those great researchers. We learn so much from them and it is very valuable to understand their processes in order to offer the best services. And we also spoke to other who wanted to know more about our data, which is, of course, free to use for researchers.

Most of the librarians were also present at the presentation of our colleagues from the National Library of Wales, @rhianjames and @sankesolutions who showed us what they’re doing with their digitised material, their solution for multilingualism and how they deal with user additions. They had just launched their new website with 1.1 million newspaper pages, so go check that out!

Finally, we also had the very impressive keynote by @wragge. (Not that the other two were not impressive, but having to choose one, this stood out). Tim Sherrat spoke about his work freeing up data from archives and databases and exposing the contents. Twitter died down for a bit, because many were touched by the subject (such as the White Australia policy), but the Storify is pretty powerful. And the keynote itself even more.

And then there was so much more that I just don’t have the room for to dive into, so look at the abstracts of the conference. They’re available via a handy search interface, look at the Twitter stream (#dh2015) and keep an eye out for any related publications.

Also, if you’re a library and do something in DH, follow @libsdh for more information about a special interest group.