Are you a humanities student (3rd-year BA, MA, or PhD) using digital methods in your research or thesis? And would you like to present you work to fellow students? We’d love to hear from you!
We – Finn Pietrass and Thomas Rozendaal, student ambassadors at the Centre for Digital Humanities at Utrecht University – are organising a student colloquium: The Digital Humanities Dialogue for Students (date TBA). This event is designed to give students insight into how digital methods can be applied across different humanities disciplines, and to inspire students to explore these approaches themselves.
We are looking for 2 to 3 student speakers from the Faculties of Humanities who are interested in sharing their experiences with digital methods in their studies or a research project. Presentations will be short (approximately 15 minutes) and aimed at a broad student audience. No prior presentation experience is required.
Interested in participating or want to learn more? Get in touch via cdh@uu.nl. The deadline to sign up as a speaker is 12 April. We’d be happy to hear from you!
The post Call for student speakers: Share your digital humanities project appeared first on Centre for Digital Humanities.
Construction of the brand-new research facilities for the ILS Labs at Drift 10 is now in full swing. Renovations are progressing rapidly and the soundproof booths that will house the labs are currently being installed. The technical installation of the first labs is expected to start in April.
The labs of the Institute for Language Sciences (ILS) are used to study language development in babies and language processing and production in adults. Much of this research involves the use of sound stimuli, which makes soundproof laboratories essential.
Several parts of Drift 10 are currently being renovated and upgraded to accommodate the new facilities. The floors of both the ground floor and first floor are being fortified to support the booths and the ventilation system is being expanded. Once completed, the basement, ground floor, and first floor will house two biolabs, two eye-tracking labs, three phonetics/general-purpose labs, an interaction lab, and a head-turn-preference lab.
Although the move is only a short distance – from Janskerkhof 13 to Drift 10 – it is a major logistical project. To ensure that ongoing research can continue with minimal disruption, the labs will be relocated one at a time. Moving each lab will take several weeks, and the full relocation is expected to be completed by the end of 2026 or beginning of 2027.
The post New ILS Labs take shape at Drift 10 appeared first on Centre for Digital Humanities.
Researchers from Utrecht University’s ArtLab are literally getting up close to art history. In the Grote Kerk in Alkmaar, they are using aerial work platforms to take thousands of photographs of the painted church vault.
Using advanced technology, the images will be combined into a detailed 3D model, allowing both researchers and visitors to explore the sixteenth-century artwork up close.
Read more about this ArtLab project with researchers Daantje Meuwissen, Sanne Frequin, and Sjors Nab in the article published by NH Nieuws on 5 March 2026 (in Dutch).
The post ArtLab in NH Nieuws: 3D model of the vault of Alkmaar’s Grote Kerk appeared first on Centre for Digital Humanities.
The Department of Digital Humanities in the Faculty of Humanities at Brock University is inviting applications from internationally recognized scholars for the Canada Impact+ Research Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Social Change, a senior academic position based in Ontario.
The role is part of the Canadian government’s Canada Impact+ Research Chairs program, a $1 billion initiative designed to attract leading researchers from around the world to address major societal challenges. The selected candidate will develop a research programme exploring how AI is designed, governed, and experienced in real-world social contexts.
Application deadline: March 26, 2026.
The post Vacancy: International digital humanities researcher at Brock University (Canada) appeared first on Centre for Digital Humanities.
Als wetenschappelijk ontwikkelaar (0,8-1,0 fte) bij het Centre for Digital Humanities draag je bij aan het ontwerp, de (door)ontwikkeling en het beheer van software oplossingen ter ondersteuning van geesteswetenschappelijk onderzoek en onderwijs. Deadline om te reageren: 29 maart 2026.
The post Vacature: CDH Software ontwikkelaar appeared first on Centre for Digital Humanities.
Every year, the Center of Digital Humanities Research (CoDHR) offers sponsorships for Texas A&M researchers to represent the University at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute in Montreal, Canada, where they will attend one course of their choosing. In addition to CoDHR's sponsorship, which covers all course registration fees, this year's award recipients will receive a bursary from the Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research to cover travel and related expenses.
Jake Brien, Department of International Affairs
Destiny Hannon, Department of Sociology
Will Lourcey, Department of History
Chang Lu, Department of Sociology
Justin Randolph, Department of History
Adam Seipp, Department History
Are you a humanities or social sciences researcher who has started coding, but feels ready to move beyond Jupyter Notebooks? The Research Software Summer School: Going Beyond Notebooks (29 June-3 July, Utrecht) offers you the chance to take your programming skills to the next level and integrate software into your own research. Registration is now open.
This five-day on-site programme is aimed at researchers that have coded before, but want to develop broader programming skills. By the end of the course, you will not only be able to create your own software solutions to research problems, but also understand and build upon existing tools developed by others.
During the summer school, you will learn for example how to:
Participants are asked to bring their own research project so that they can work on their own research questions while developing their programming skills. This does not need to be a fully developed research idea; it could be a pilot project or even just a research question and a dataset.
The summer school is open to researchers affiliated with any Dutch university or research institute, from PhD candidates to professors. Small groups are encouraged to apply together to work on a shared project. There are 34 places available. Secure your place by registering in time. Deadline to apply is 15 June 2026.
This event is part of the project “Daidalos – A Social Sciences and Humanities Training on Research Software” (file no. ICT.TDCC.001.006), funded in part by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) through the Thematic Digital Competence Centre Social Sciences & Humanities (TDCC-SSH).
The post Boost your coding skills at the Research Software Summer School 2026 appeared first on Centre for Digital Humanities.
As of January 2026, Utrecht University’s ArtLab will formally become part of the Centre for Digital Humanities (CDH). ArtLab is an academic heritage laboratory that combines advanced imaging and 3D technologies with expertise in material art history.
Its integration into the CDH will support Artlab’s continued growth and enable a broadening towards new digital humanities themes and applications. Bringing together humanities researchers who work with innovative digital methods, creates opportunities for cross-fertilisation and intellectual exchange.
At ArtLab, researchers and students work on location using mobile equipment. They develop accessible research applications, provide training for professionals, and collaborate closely with national and international external partners. ArtLab aspires to be the first laboratory in the Netherlands – and beyond – where material objects and digital methodologies are brought together for the study of art and culture.
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Data School zoekt voor 16 tot 28 uur een enthousiaste medewerker kennisvalorisatie/teamleider die zich bezighoudt met projectmanagement, business development en het begeleiden van collega’s.
Als tijdelijke medewerker, in verband met vervanging zwangerschapsverlof, zul je in eerste instantie deze positie vervangen en coördineer je lopende projecten van Data School. Er is ruimte voor eigen inbreng en creatieve ideeën in de vorm van business development en acquisitie.
Deadline om te reageren: 5 februari 2026
Lees meer en reageer (interne vacature Universiteit Utrecht)
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Our brand-new Spring 2026 Training Programme offers a range of exciting new workshops and lectures, including Qualtrics, Small Language Models, and AI & investigative journalism.
Whether you are taking your first steps in the digital humanities or looking to deepen your expertise, our free workshops and lectures provide fresh perspectives and hands-on learning opportunities.
Some sessions are open to all, while others are reserved for staff and students from the Faculty of Humanities and other UU faculties. We look forward to welcoming you in one – or several – of these workshops and lectures.
The post Spring 2026 Training Programme – Open for registration! appeared first on Centre for Digital Humanities.
Dear Colleagues and Students,
As many of you know, recent organizational changes at Texas A&M, shifts in national funding priorities, and developments within the field of digital humanities have prompted a review of the Center of Digital Humanities Research (CoDHR) and its future direction.
Pending final approval, CoDHR will transition from the College of Arts & Sciences to Texas A&M University Libraries at the end of the Spring 2026 semester. In preparation for this move, CoDHR is collaborating with principal investigators and the Libraries to ensure the smooth transfer and archiving of existing projects. Please note that the Digital Humanities Certificate, administered by the Department of English, will remain unchanged.
Since its founding in 2018, CoDHR has played an important role in advancing Texas A&M’s research profile. We believe the Libraries are well positioned to sustain and strengthen CoDHR’s university-wide mission to support digital humanities research during this period of change in higher education. I want to express my sincere appreciation to Director Maura Ives and Associate Director Amy Earhart for their leadership and service.
The College remains deeply committed to fostering research in digital humanities and the humanities more broadly. To that end, we are investing an additional $50,000 annually for the next three years in the Glasscock Center for Humanities Research to expand existing programs and launch new initiatives that will seed and support digital humanities projects. In addition, the College will fund a new three-year humanities research initiative at up to $50,000 per year to amplify emerging, multidisciplinary areas of scholarship. Additional information and an open call for proposals will be available next semester.
Simon W. North
John W. Bevan Professor of Chemistry
Interim Dean
College of Arts and Sciences
377 Houston Street, 4th Floor
College Station, TX 77843-3357
979-458-6947
After the winter holiday break, the Digital Humanities Walk-in Hours will resume on 22 January, 2026.
Do you have a question related to digital humanities? Drop by our weekly walk-in hours every Thursday from 14:00 to 15:00. All humanities staff and students are welcome, whether you are a beginner or working at an advanced level.
Sessions take place in person in room 0.32 in the University Library City Centre, with one exception: on 19 March 2026, the walk-in hour will be online only.
For now, we wish you a happy holiday!
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The developers of the CDH Research Software Lab (RSLab) are currently working on a new upload feature for the text search and exploration Textcavator (formerly I-Analyzer). For the final development phase, they are looking for researchers who would like to test this new functionality.
Do you have a dataset you would like to use in Textcavator? Sign up for the pilot and help the RSLab further improve the tool!
The upload feature allows researchers to add their own dataset directly to Textcavator. This makes the tool even more accessible and easier to use. The developers are now in the final development stage and would like to test the feature in practice with users.
You decide. In Textcavator, you can specify for each dataset whether it is:
All researchers within the Faculty of Humanities and other faculties at Utrecht University are welcome to participate.
Textcavator is designed for collections of texts. You can upload your own research data or an open access dataset you want to use in Textcavator. Both small and large datasets are welcome.
Data must be provided in a CSV or Excel file. The developers can advise you on structuring or cleaning your data if needed.
The RSLab has been developing Textcavator since 2017 for the Faculty of Humanities at Utrecht University. The tool is designed to make text search and exploration as accessible and easy as possible. With the new upload feature, Textcavator will become even more efficient.
The pilot is intended to test this new functionality. The developers are ready to help if anything is unclear or not working properly. Your feedback will be used to further improve the upload feature.
The developers would also love to hear your ideas: which features are missing? What kind of support would be useful? What could be improved?
Register for the pilot before 15 February 2026 by emailing cdh@uu.nl. After registering, you will receive further instructions.
Read the interview with developer Luka van der Plas about Textcavator and the pilot.
The post Help the Research Software Lab test their new upload feature appeared first on Centre for Digital Humanities.
I-Analyzer is now called Textcavator, a name that better reflects the flagship tool of the CDH Research Software Lab (RSLab). In addition to the new name, the RSLab is introducing an upload feature for adding your own dataset, as well as several new corpora. The Centre for Digital Humanities spoke with scientific developer Luka van der Plas about the updates.
‘Textcavator better reflects what the tool actually does than the name I-Analyzer,’ says Van der Plas. ‘It is primarily designed for exploring texts, rather than for conducting in-depth analysis. Excavator literally means a digging machine, but it is also used figuratively to mean digging into something. And that is exactly what the tool does: it retrieves information from texts.’
‘At its core, it is a search engine: you can search a dataset using keywords that are relevant to your research. It is a comprehensive tool for finding what you are looking for. That is why we refer to it as a text search and exploration tool, rather than a text-mining tool. Afterwards, you can carry out more extensive analyses yourself—qualitative or quantitative—using the search results you download from Textcavator.’
‘The analysis tools we offer within Textcavator—simple statistics and basic visualisations—are intended to help you search as effectively as possible, not to conduct your actual research. You can filter by time period or category and bookmark documents. We also provide visualisations and statistics to help refine search queries. These show, for example, how a search term is distributed across categories or time periods, or which words frequently appear in its context. Depending on the dataset, we also offer more advanced features, such as Word Embeddings and Named Entity Recognition.’
‘The RSLab began developing what was then called I-Analyzer in 2017. This allowed us to tell researchers: we already have a working tool. We only need to load your dataset into it and perhaps add a button or two. That way, we can support even small projects with limited funding, which I find very rewarding.’
‘Working open source is also important to us. And because we develop the tool within the university, we are not driven by profit: we are truly here for the researcher. We work closely with researchers to develop Textcavator, although external users can also use it. We wanted a tool that is not overly technical, can accommodate many different types of datasets, and is suitable for all disciplines within the humanities.’
‘No. We prefer to make data public, but that is not always possible. Cultural data is often protected by copyright. That is why, when uploading, you can decide who gets access: everyone, only the university, a specific (research) group, or just yourself.’
‘In collaboration with the University Library, we have added several new corpora from the publisher Gale, including nineteenth-century British and American newspapers and magazines such as Punch and Illustrated London News. These are great additions to the newspaper corpora we already offer, such as The Guardian and The Times.’
‘Many researchers bring their own data—collected or cleaned for their research. In addition to joint acquisitions with the University Library, we also occasionally add public corpora for which there is wide demand, such as the KB newspaper corpus, DBNL, Gallica and Le Figaro.’
‘The largest is People & Parliament, a leading project in political history, conducted with the University of Jyväskylä (Finland). They needed an efficient tool to search a vast collection of parliamentary debates from across Europe.’
‘Another example is Traces of Sound, a much smaller project. For this, we built a proof of concept in Textcavator using a small set of sources and annotations related to references to sound. This helped the researcher in submitting a larger grant proposal.’
‘We specifically focus on researchers with little experience in text and data mining. The tool is designed to be as user-friendly as possible. For those who want more, additional features are available. But even more advanced features, such as Named Entity Recognition, can be used without extensive technical knowledge.’
‘The new upload feature allows researchers to add their own datasets directly to Textcavator. Currently, this is always done by us, which makes researchers dependent on our available time. We are now in the final development phase and are therefore organizing a pilot to test the feature together with the research community.’
‘One goal is to identify any bottlenecks. Textcavator is designed for highly diverse data, which can also complicate things. We want to ensure everything works smoothly and clearly before opening the feature to everyone. During the pilot we will receive feedback and can step in immediately if something is unclear or not yet working properly.’
‘We also think it is important that the feature truly aligns with researchers’ needs. For example: how much should be filled in automatically, and how much should users be able to configure themselves? In which file formats would they like to upload their data? Instead of speculating about this behind closed doors, we want to ask users directly.’
‘We are looking for a broad group of researchers. Anyone with data they would like to add to Textcavator can take part. This may be their own research data, but also an open access dataset. A small Excel file with a hundred documents is just as welcome as a large dataset. The only requirement is that you can clean of format the data yourself, if needed.
‘In the short term, we aim to make the process user-friendly and accessible, focusing on small adjustments such as additional guidance and feedback. In the long term, we are considering larger expansions, such as more file formats, or even manual data entry.’
‘There are also features already in Textcavator that are not yet offered through the form, such as adding images or word embeddings. These could be valuable additions, but they also make the upload process more complex for researchers.’
‘The biggest challenge is maintaining clarity for the user. We continue to add new features, but we want to prevent the interface from becoming overwhelming. It is a constant balance between accessibility and technical possibilities.’
‘And what strikes me is how similar the needs of researchers in the humanities and social sciences actually are. You might expect them to require very different tools, but in practice that is not the case.’
Currently, scientific developers Luka van der Plas, Jelte van Boheemen, Mees van Stiphout and Ben Bonfil are working on Textcavator alongside their other projects.
Read more about Textcavator here.
Read more and sign up for the pilot here.
The post Textcavator renewed: new name, new upload feature, and new corpora appeared first on Centre for Digital Humanities.
The Centre for Digital Humanities (CDH) invites permanent academic staff of the Faculty of Humanities at Utrecht University to apply for the position of CDH affiliate. Affiliates act as ambassadors and liaisons within their departments, supporting the ambitions of the CDH. Currently, we have three openings in the departments History and Art History, Philosophy and Religious Studies, and Languages, Literature and Communication.
As CDH affiliate, you will help strengthen the connection between your department and digital humanities. You will do this by:
In addition to these core tasks, each affiliate will pursue an individual project as part of the position.
Affiliates meet periodically with the CDH programme team to strengthen collaboration and exchange.
New candidates will be appointed by April 2026 and will start in the 2026-2027 academic year.
You can self-nominate and apply directly to the CDH. You can apply for a period of 1 to 3 years, depending on the scope of your proposed project.
Your application should include:
Projects may focus on, for example, organising events or workshops, consortium building, developing relevant educational modules, large SSH infrastructure grant applications, or building networks and projects with external parties.
Please send your CV and proposal to cdh@uu.nl.
Application deadline: 1 March 2026
The CDH aims to empower all Faculty of Humanities staff and students by enriching their digital competencies and fostering an ethical and critical approach to digital humanities and AI. The CDH does this, among other ways, by offering a wide range of tailored courses, grants, consultancy sessions, and walk-in hours; by connecting humanities researchers and DH specialists; and by deploying an in-house team of research engineers with humanities backgrounds.
Do you have questions about the position or application procedure? Please contact cdh@uu.nl.
The post Vacancy: Three affiliate positions at the Centre for Digital Humanities (0.1 fte) in GKG, F&R, and TLC appeared first on Centre for Digital Humanities.
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