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.

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.

(NB all abstracts are available here: http://dhbenelux.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/dhbenelux-final-programme.pdf)

We agreed with this tweet from our colleague, because we felt that many of the presentations that were about actual research that (according to Jesper Verhoef’s and Melvin Wevers’ presentation) includes heuristics, hermeneutics, tool criticism, corpus faceting, and source criticism, remained on a high level in order to introduce each of the steps. However, because the whole process was discussed, there was no time to go into the details of each of those steps. This left us somewhat unsatisfied in our search for the way DH-researchers conduct their work.

We not only want to know which process you followed in your research, but also why you decided on one thing over the other. How did you prepare your data? Why did you choose this tool over that tool and what are the effects on your outcomes? You disambiguated your named entities? Cool! But how did you do this? Are those tools on Github and are they useful for our users? And also, why did you ask what you asked and what does the answer contribute to your field? But perhaps this is exemplary for a conference about DH given the wide range of skills of the attendees and the varying interests and research topics?

Heard more than once: we need to be working with our users instead of for them. To ensure a good fit between tools or data and the user, discussion and input is needed! For institutions such as the KB this offers a valuable lesson (which we have in fact already been putting into practice, for example with our Researcher-in-residence programme).

The generic tool is the holy grail for digital humanities (© @sclaeyssens) no matter how hard we try and search for it, it probably does not exist. Every user and thus every user need is unique. For the KB this prompts the question: how can we cater for these needs?

Quite a few presentations were reflecting on DH as a community itself, asking questions about the gender balance in DH, or whether we have an overview of the projects and research that is happening. Other than being a healthy evaluative approach, it also points towards how rich and thriving the DH community actually is in the Benelux. It is ever growing. The conference was fully booked this year and hopefully grow even bigger next year (it has been announced that DH Benelux in 2016 will be on 9-10 June 2016, at Belval in Luxembourg).

And finally, something we didn’t comment on, but do like; paraphrasing keynote speaker William Noel: ‘Do not love you website but love your data. Make your data promiscuous!’.

The Digital Humanities team of the KB presented a poster at the conference, which we will discuss in the next blog post. Stay tuned!

Prof. dr. Huub Wijfjes (RUG/UvA) showing word clouds used in his research.

On 24 March, we opened up our auditorium to 10 research projects that use our digitised newspapers. The presenters came from many areas of DH research as we had historians, linguists, computer programmers, a linked data specialist, and media researchers. Next to this, we also asked colleagues to present what they are working on with regards to our newspapers. This resulted in presentations about copyright, digitisation (OCR and future plans), a Wikipedia project, the Research Lab and Europeana Newspapers. All in all we had three blocks of presentations spanning the whole day, and an auditorium filled with interested researchers, journalists, librarians, students and colleagues.

The original idea of the day was to provide a networking opportunity for those researchers who used our newspapers in their projects, but while organising it we noticed that not only those researchers were interested in hearing what others are doing, but that a wider group of people wanted to know what was possible with the data set. When we opened up the registration, we quickly outgrew the room we booked and had to transfer to the auditorium. Ultimately, we had 145 people who visited the symposium and who were responsible for lively discussions after the presentations and during the breaks.

Discussions in between presentations.

The varied audience and speakers of the day also meant having different levels of expertise in Digital Humanities and working with data, but this provided very valuable insights into working with the newspapers. The differences in skills between, for example, a historian and a programmer provides challenges when working together in research projects, but also provides a very valuable learning experience for both.

Working with new computational methods might be a bit scary for an inexperienced researcher, but can mean very interesting results, according to Dr. Martijn Kleppe (EUR). But how does a researcher know if these results are trustworthy? If the software actually does its job? Dr. Antske Fokkens (VU) explains that it is important to show researchers that they should be aware of what software can and cannot do and how you should interpret results. Another common technical issue that researchers came across is the lack of computational capacity. Humanities faculties often do not have the setup to process large amounts of data.

Dr. Antske Fokkens on the methods used at the Vrije Universiteit.

Next to these technical challenges, the material itself also provides problems when using it, such as OCR issues, lack of access due to the copyright, changes in the meaning of words and historical spelling and of course the ‘problem’ that we have not yet digitised every newspaper page in our collection. Working with this data and around these challenges is something that we can work together in. The KB works hard to improve the access to and usability of the newspapers and with the KB Research Lab, we can also provide support in the use of the data.

Martijn Kleppe listening to his colleague Laura Hollink

Because of this, many researchers have already used the newspapers in great research projects, such as Polimedia. Here, our newspapers are linked to the parliamentary papers and the radio bulletins, providing a search engine that shows how parliamentary debates are mentioned in the media. Or the Dutch Ships and Sailors-project where maritime data is linked together (and to our newspapers) to provide information about Dutch ships in the 18th and 19th century. Mentioning all success stories might result in a very long blog, but all presentations (in Dutch) are available via our website (scroll down for the URLs).

We were very happy with the whole symposium, the great speakers and the wonderful audience and we hope to be able to organise something similar in the future. If you are interested in our newspapers, other data sets, or our Research Lab, feel free to contact us!