[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.
