This programme as detailed at the KB-website (“Programme”) is operated by the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, National Library of the Netherlands (“KB”), Prins Willem-Alexanderhof 5 (2509 LK) Den Haag, The Netherlands.
KB Research
Research at the National Library of the Netherlands
Category: Digital Humanities (page 3 of 4)
Deze blogpost is geschreven door dr. Martijn Kleppe en is herblogt van www.martijnkleppe.nl (17 april 2015). Sinds publicatie zijn enkele zaken binnen het onderzoek aangepast. Binnenkort schrijft Martijn hierover een uitgebreidere, Engelstalige blog.
Sinds 1 april ben ik voor een half jaar ‘onderzoeker te gast’ op de onderzoeksafdeling van de Koninklijke Bibliotheek om te werken aan mijn project ‘FoCon – Foto’s in en uit context’. Het is een erg leuke kans omdat ik de ruimte krijg om de digitale kranten– en tijdschriftencollectie alsmede het webarchief van de KB te verkennen waarbij ik me vooral richt op het gepubliceerde beeldmateriaal.
Reblogged from http://www.europeana-newspapers.eu/final-report/
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.
Two weeks ago I just arrived in Sydney, Australia after a quite comfortable, but long flight for DH2015, thé conference on Digital Humanities. We had the good fortune to be able to present our Researcher-in-residence program there, during the poster presentations. But that meant, of course, that we (my colleague Steven Claeyssens and I) could also enjoy the rest of the conference. And enjoy it, we did! Of course, there is too much to capture in one blog post, so I’ll just highlight a few that you might be seeing some more of here or in our Lab.
This post is written by Martijn Kleppe and adapted for the blog by Lotte Wilms
During the LODLAM Challenge in Sydney this summer, CLARIN-NL project PoliMedia has won the Open Data Prize. PoliMedia assists researchers in analysing the media coverage of debates in the Dutch Parliament. The system automatically generates links between the debates and coverage about those debates in newspapers and radio bulletins, which have been provided by the KB. Out of 39 entries, the jury judged PoliMedia to be the most innovative project because of its optimal use of semantic techniques and transparent process in opening up the generated links to other researchers.
Previously, PoliMedia won the Veni LinkedUp Challenge and was finalist of the Semantic Web Challenge. The project was a joined effort of the Erasmus University Rotterdam, TU Delft, Vrije Universiteit, the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, National Library of the Netherlands and has been financed by CLARIN-NL.
For more information, please visit www.polimedia.nl or see the video at http://polimedia.nl/about. Do you also want to use a KB data set for a project? Leave a comment below or contact us at dh @ kb . nl.
This blog post was written by Adeline van den Berg and Lotte Wilms
On 8 and 9 June 2015, the second DH Benelux conference took place, bringing approx. 150 Digital Humanists together in the beautiful building of the University of Antwerp. Apart from great lunches, conversations and a poster reception alongside penguins and flamingos, a few things stood out for us. Below we sum up what we think were common threads, with the help of some tweets.
This post is written by Dr. Jiyin He – Researcher-in-residence at the KB Research Lab from June – October 2014.
Being able to study primary sources is pivotal to the work of historians. Today’s mass digitisation of historical records such as books, newspapers, and pamphlets now provides researchers with the opportunity to study an unprecedented amount of material without the need for physical access to archives. Access to this material is provided through search systems, however, the effectiveness of such systems seems to lag behind the major web search engines. Some of the things that make web search engines so effective are redundancy of information, that popular material is often considered relevant material, and that the preferences of other users may be used to determine what you would find relevant. These properties do not hold or are unavailable for collections of historical material. In the past 3 months I have worked at the KB as a guest researcher. Together with Dr. Samuël Kruizinga, a historian, we explored how we can enhance the search system at KB to assist the search challenges of the historian. In this blogpost, I will share our experience of working together, the system we have developed, as well as lessons learnt during this project.
At DH2013, we presented a poster to ask researchers what they need from a National Library. The responses varied from ‘Nothing, just give us your data’ to ‘We’d like to be fully supported with tools and services’, showing once again that different users have different requirements. In order to accommodate all groups of researchers, the Collections department of the KB, who ‘own’ the data, and the Research department, where tools and services are developed, combined efforts and spoke to scholars to discuss the best method of supporting their work. However, we noticed that it was still quite difficult to get a good idea of how they used our data and in what way our actions and decisions would benefit them. Also, it seemed that researchers were often not aware of what activities the we undertake in this respect, which led to work being done twice.
The KB has about 10 million digitised newspaper pages, ranging from 1650 until 1995. We negotiated rights to make these pages available for research and this has happened more and more over the past years. However, we thought that many of these projects might be interested in knowing what others are doing and we wanted to provide a networking opportunity for them to share their results. This is why we organised a newspapers symposium focusing on the digitised newspapers of the KB, which was a great success!
Prof. dr. Huub Wijfjes (RUG/UvA) showing word clouds used in his research.
[A] topic model is a type of statistical model for discovering the abstract “topics” that occur in a collection of documents (Wikipedia).
Topic modelling is a very popular method in the Digital Humanities to discover more about a large set of data and is also used by many researchers working on data of the KB. Unfortunately, not all topic modelling tools are as easy to access, due to a lack of technical skills or a lack of access to the data for example. The current guest researcher at the KB (Dr. Samuël Kruizinga) came across such problems while doing his research into the memory of the First World War in the KB newspapers. Not only was it difficult for him to select a corpus to work with, he was also unfamiliar with the go-to tool MALLET. Luckily, his university (Universiteit van Amsterdam) wanted to help and provided funds to organise a workshop, not only for him, but also for other academics interested in topic modelling.
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