Are you a Digital Humanities student or early career researcher in Belgium who would like to discuss DH with other early career researchers in the Belgian DH community? If so, you might be interested in joining the DH Virtual Discussion Group for ECRs!

The DH Virtual Discussion Group is a joint initiative organized by individuals at multiple Belgian institutions. We strive to involve speakers from all Belgian institutions and encourage participation from all those who are interested in DH and are located at any Belgian institution. This series, the core organizers are Leah Budke (KU Leuven), Tom Gheldof (KU Leuven, CLARIAH-VL+), Paavo van der Eecken (University of Antwerp), and Loren Verreyen (University of Antwerp). Over the past years, the series has become a regular event. The spring 2026 edition proudly marks our twelfth term.

Our first two sessions this spring will continue the “under-the-hood” format, which entails a volunteer from our community providing a thirty-minute overview of a digital project implementing a given tool, approach, or platform. This is not meant to be a polished research presentation, or to present findings or results, but rather to give our community a behind-the-scenes look at how decisions were made and why specific tools were chosen or developed. The hope is also that this presenter will give attendees some ideas about how to get started implementing a specific tool or workflow, and that they can also answer questions or contribute to a discussion on other projects in our community that might be using similar methodologies or addressing similar issues. This “under-the-hood” session format allows us to have focused discussions around a specific project where we can learn from each other in an informal way. In addition, by implementing this format we can maintain the low threshold for contributing and engaging in the conversations.

Our final session will be a special in person session during which members of our community can give an elevator pitch of their DH Benelux contribution.

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The spring 2026 schedule will be updated as details about upcoming talks are confirmed. Please check back here or on the website (linked above) for full details. Information about each session will also be circulated via the mailing list. 

Session 1
Date: Monday 30 March, 15h-16h30 CEST via Teams
Speaker(s): Julie Van Ongeval, VUB
Title: The Fall of Antwerp (1585) as a linguistic turning point? Language change from macro- and micro-perspectives.
Abstract:  The Spanish recapture of Antwerp (1585) during the Eighty Years’ War, known as the Fall of Antwerp, marks a crucial turning point, not only from a historical but also from a linguistic perspective. Historically, the Fall triggered profound social, economic, and demographic transformations. Prior to 1585, Antwerp had flourished as one of Europe’s largest and most prosperous cities, characterized by substantial immigration. In the aftermath of the Fall, however, the city experienced severe socio-economic decline and large-scale emigration, causing its population to decrease by more than half (from 100,000 inhabitants in 1580 to 42,000 in 1589) (De Meester 2011, Lesger 2007). From a linguistic standpoint, the Fall has traditionally been associated with what De Vooys (1970) termed “the decline of the Southern Netherlands”. The event is believed to have shifted the linguistic center of gravity to the Northern Netherlands, slowing down or even halting the ongoing processes of language standardization in the Southern Netherlands and, by extension, in Early Modern Antwerp (Van der Sijs 2020). ​Yet, these linguistic claims have primarily been based on printed, literary, or explicitly normative texts. Considerably less is known about language use in more informal and everyday contexts (Elspaß 2020). 

This study addresses that gap by analyzing informal, handwritten letters preserved in the newly developed Early Modern Antwerp Corpus (1564-1653). Drawing on Dixon’s punctuated equilibrium model (1997), which proposes that significant historical events can accelerate linguistic change, we test an alternative hypothesis: rather than causing stagnation, the Fall of Antwerp may have triggered intensified linguistic variation and change. To assess this hypothesis, we examine six linguistic features that were undergoing change and were relevant to the process of Dutch standardization (clause negation, verbal cluster order variation, schwa apocope, the prefix ge- in past participles, word-final /k/, spelling of /ɣ/ in onset). First, we analyze developments at the community level to identify broader patterns of change. We then adopt a more microscopic perspective, investigating how individual writers respond to the shifting sociohistorical context. This includes both inter-individual variation (e.g. social categories and networks) and intra-individual change across the lifespan. By investigating the linguistic consequences of the Fall of Antwerp from both macro- and micro-level perspectives, this study aims to bridge the three waves of sociolinguistic research, integrating community-level patterns with individual-level variation and change.  

Session 2
Date: Monday 20 April, 15h-16h30 CET via Teams
Speaker(s): Léa Hermenault, UA
Title: The Belgian Historical Gazetteer: (historical) toponyms in a digital era
Abstract:My presentation will introduce the Belgian Historical Gazetteer, a project founded by CLARIAH-VL+ and hosted at the University of Antwerp. This project aims to set up a historical gazetteer of toponyms for the whole present-day territory of Belgium, in order to provide researchers with a collection of data that does not stop at Belgian provincial borders and which goes beyond the level of municipalities.

First, I will explain how the gazetteer is constructed using both automatic extraction of text from old maps and manual corrections/additions. Then, I will show how this gazetteer will help researchers deal with place names that appear in their sources. Finally, I will demonstrate the potential of digitized lists of historical place names for both toponymic and landscape studies which make digital gazetteers, aside from their classic function, innovative exploring tools.

Session 3 – Special In-Person DH Benelux Session
Date: Monday 18 May, 13h30-16h CEST,
Location: room 1.01 Gogotte, Hoek 38, Leuvenseweg 38, Brussels (location is within walking distance from the central station)
Speaker(s): various members of our community
Format: elevator pitches of DH Benelux contributions

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There are an increasing number of conferences, workshops, and funding opportunities in DH, and we would like to ensure that you are aware of them. We will start every session with a moment for individuals to share news about upcoming lectures, workshops, seminars, and conferences. We have a corresponding Slack group where we also share these opportunities both during the discussion group meetings and in between. The link to join the Slack group is included in every email sent out to the mailing list, so watch for it there or send us an email to request access.

If you would like to register or invite other colleagues to join, please complete the registration form for the mailing list here. Please note, if you have received emails from us about the Discussion Group in the past, it means you are already on our mailing list. In that case, there is no need to register again—you will receive the emails with the MS Teams link and any additional information on the day of the session. Additionally, you will also receive updates on upcoming sessions including further details about speakers and the “under-the-hood” presentation topics. 

Are you a frequent attendee of the DH Virtual Discussion Group and would like a low-threshold way to become more involved in the organization? We are looking for ambassadors to promote the group within their university networks. If this might be a role you would like to take on, get in touch and we can tell you more!

We look forward to seeing you this spring!

3 days- 3 Webinars

This edition of Open Access Week is dedicated to researchers and their need for guidance through open access publication models and projects.

Join together, take action, and raise awareness about the importance of open knowledge sharing

Program

Monday October 20|12:30-13:30: 

• Theme: OPEN ACCESS TO PUBLICATIONS IN HORIZON EUROPE
• Speaker: Victoria Tsoukala (Policy Officer – European Commission – Unit A4- Open Science & Research Infrastructures)
• Registration

This session will explore the Horizon Europe Open Access rules and provide practical insights into their implementation. We will discuss how project officers are trained, which units are responsible, common questions from stakeholders, relevant statistics, lessons learned, and key takeaways for the next program cycle. We also anticipate questions and feedback from researchers who are applying these rules in practice. Their experiences will help enrich the discussion, and we hope the webinar will serve as a platform for sharing advice, best practices, and challenges.

Wednesday October 22|12:30-13:30: 

• Theme: HOW TO RETAIN CONTROL OVER YOUR PUBLICATIONS IN THE AGE OF AI ?
• Speaker: Mr. Joris Deene, Everest Advocaten, legal advisor SA&S
• Registration

As an academic author, navigating copyright in the era of Open Access can be challenging. In this session, you will learn how to strategically manage and retain your rights before, during, and after publication. We provide you with concrete tools and legal insights to maximize the impact of your work.

After this session, you will be able to:

• Choose and apply the right Creative Commons license for your specific goals.
• Understand and exercise your statutory right of secondary publication under Belgian law.
• Implement a rights retention strategy to secure your author’s rights before signing a publishing agreement.
• Navigate the challenges of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in academic publishing, focusing on copyright implications and publisher policies.

Friday October 24|12:30-14:00: 

• Theme: DIAMOND OPEN ACCESS
• Speakers : Clément Dessy (FNRS Research Associate- ULB, co-editor of the journal COnTEXTES ), Geoffrey Compère (FNRS Research Director- ULB, senior editor of Scipost Physics), Jonathan Dumont (PhD – Project Manager – ULiège Library)
• Registration

In response to growing concerns about equity and accessibility in scholarly publishing, an increasing number of researchers are advocating for the establishment of Diamond Open Access journals, which provide unrestricted access to research outputs for readers and enable authors to publish without incurring Article Processing Charges (APCs), thereby fostering inclusivity and the democratization of knowledge.

The webinar speakers will present complementary perspectives on Diamond Open Access publishing, including founding a new journal, converting an existing one, and serving as a senior editor on a Diamond Open Access platform.

Practicalities

• When: October 20-26, 2025 with webinars on 20, 22 and 24 October
• Where: Online
• For who: Anyone who needs guidance through open access publication models and projects.
• Price and registration: Free but mandatory.
• More info: Click here

Are you a Digital Humanities student or early career researcher in Belgium who would like to discuss DH with other early career researchers in the Belgian DH community? If so, you might be interested in joining the DH Virtual Discussion Group for ECRs!

The DH Virtual Discussion Group is a joint initiative organized by individuals at multiple Belgian institutions. We strive to involve speakers from all Belgian institutions and encourage participation from all those who are interested in DH and are located at any Belgian institution. This year, the core organizers are Leah Budke (KU Leuven Libraries Artes), Tom Gheldof (KU Leuven, CLARIAH-VL+), Paavo van der Eecken (University of Antwerp), and Loren Verreyen (University of Antwerp). Over the past years, the series has become a regular event. The fall 2025 edition proudly marks our eleventh term.

Our first two sessions this fall will continue the “under-the-hood” format, which entails a volunteer from our community providing a thirty-minute overview of a digital project implementing a given tool, approach, or platform. This is not meant to be a polished research presentation, or to present findings or results, but rather to give our community a behind-the-scenes look at how decisions were made and why specific tools were chosen or developed. The hope is also that this presenter will give attendees some ideas about how to get started implementing a specific tool or workflow, and that they can also answer questions or contribute to a discussion on other projects in our community that might be using similar methodologies or addressing similar issues. This “under-the-hood” session format allows us to have focused discussions around a specific project where we can learn from each other in an informal way. In addition, by implementing this format we can maintain the low threshold for contributing and engaging in the conversations.

Our final session will be a round table session during which 3-4 members of our community chat with us about their experience doing a PhD with a Digital Humanities component.

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The following sessions are on the schedule for the fall 2025 semester (details will be updated as confirmed):

Session 1
Monday 20 October, 15h-16h30 CEST via Teams
Speaker(s): Theodora Rontzova, KU Leuven
Title: Cultural Heritage in Virtual Worlds – the IMPULSE Project
Abstract: My presentation will introduce IMPULSE, a project that aims to enhance accessibility to digitized cultural heritage collections through immersive technology, fostering diverse narrative and public engagement. Over the course of three years, IMPULSE will enhance accessibility to digitized cultural content, optimize streamline digitization processes in the three focus areas of education, artistic creation and CCSIs, develop legal frameworks to mitigate risks and barriers in utilizing cultural heritage data, and foster collaborative creation on immersive platforms. My presentation will provide an overview of the most recent developments within the different Work Packages of the project, with focus on the findings of the two recent workshops in Leuven and in Malta. I will share insights from the development of the virtual platform that will lead to the project’s final Hackathon later this year, and I will finally invite participants to engage with our Community of Practice.

Session 2
Monday 17 November, 15h-16h30 CET via Teams
Speaker(s): Sara Budts, VUB
Title: Finding Patterns in Lottery Rhymes of the Late Medieval and Early Modern Low Countries with and without AI
Abstract: This presentation explores the patterns in lottery rhymes produced in the late medieval and early modern Low Countries, with a focus on the rhymes written by women. The lottery was a popular fundraising event in the Low Countries. Lottery rhymes, personal messages attached to the lottery tickets, provide a valuable source for historians. We collected more than 11,000 digitised short texts from five lotteries held between 1446 and 1606. We have used GysBERT, a language model of historical Dutch, to identify distinctively male and female discourses in the lottery rhymes corpus. Although the model pointed us to some interesting patterns, it also showed that lottery rhymes written by men and women do not radically differ from each other. This is consistent with insights from premodern women’s history which stresses that women worked within societal, and in this case literary, conventions, sometimes subverting them, sometimes adapting them, sometimes adopting them unchanged.

Session 3 – Round Table Session
Monday 15 December, 15h-16h30 CET via Teams
Speaker(s): To be confirmed
Session Description: This session features insights from 3-4 PhD researchers in our network who are working with DH methods. The session is designed to be free-flowing and informal, but you can expect the following avenues of discussion: (1) how the researcher became interested or started integrating DH methods in their research, (2) the challenges faced when learning new DH skills, (3) important resources that have helped throughout this process, (4) other challenges encountered related to the perception or acceptance of DH, and (5) specific benefits that DH methods have offered for the researcher’s work.

---

There are an increasing number of conferences, workshops, and funding opportunities in DH, and we would like to ensure that you are aware of them. We will start every session with a moment for individuals to share news about upcoming lectures, workshops, seminars, and conferences. We have a corresponding Slack group where we also share these opportunities both during the discussion group meetings and in between. The link to join the Slack group is included in every email sent out to the mailing list, so watch for it there or send us an email to request access.

If you would like to register or invite other colleagues to join, please complete the registration form for the mailing list here. Please note, if you have received emails from us about the Discussion Group in the past, it means you are already on our mailing list. In that case, there is no need to register again—you will receive the emails with the MS Teams link and any additional information on the day of the session. Additionally, you will also receive updates on upcoming sessions including further details about speakers and the “under-the-hood” presentation topics. 

Are you a frequent attendee of the DH Virtual Discussion Group and would like a low-threshold way to become more involved in the organization? We are looking for ambassadors to promote the group within their university networks. If this might be a role you would like to take on, get in touch and we can tell you more!

We look forward to seeing you this fall!

Are you a Digital Humanities student or early career researcher in Belgium who would like to discuss DH with other early career researchers in the Belgian DH community? If so, you might be interested in joining the DH Virtual Discussion Group for ECRs!

The DH Virtual Discussion Group is a joint initiative organized by individuals at three different Belgian institutions. We strive to involve speakers from various Belgian institutions and encourage participation from all those who are interested in DH and are located at any Belgian institution. This year, the core organizers are Leah Budke (KU Leuven Libraries Artes), Tom Gheldof (KU Leuven, CLARIAH-VL+), Sven Lieber (KBR), Paavo van der Eecken (University of Antwerp), and Loren Verreyen (University of Antwerp). Over the past years, the series has become a regular event. The spring 2025 edition proudly marks our tenth term.

Our first two sessions this spring will continue the “under-the-hood” format, which entails a volunteer from our community providing a thirty-minute overview of a digital project implementing a given tool, approach, or platform. This is not meant to be a polished research presentation, or to present findings or results, but rather to give our community a behind-the-scenes look at how decisions were made and why specific tools were chosen or developed. The hope is also that this presenter will give attendees some ideas about how to get started implementing a specific tool or workflow, and that they can also answer questions or contribute to a discussion on other projects in our community that might be using similar methodologies or addressing similar issues. This “under-the-hood” session format allows us to have focused discussions around a specific project where we can learn from each other in an informal way. In addition, by implementing this format we can maintain the low threshold for contributing and engaging in the conversations.

Our final session will be our special DH Benelux session during which members of our community pitch their DH Benelux contribution in the form of an elevator pitch. This special session takes place in person (with option to join online), which is a fun way to bring the community together while also allowing us to learn about the diverse projects being done in the Benelux region!

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The following sessions are on the schedule for the spring 2025 semester (details will be updated as confirmed):

Session 1
Monday 17 March, 15h-16h30 CET via Teams
Please note: a last-minute change of schedule has been made. Unfortunately, Tess Dejaeghere is unable to present for us during this session. Tom Gheldof will present about the CLARIAH-VL+ project.
Speaker(s): Tom Gheldof, KU Leuven (coordinator CLARIAH-VL+)
Title: Building a DH Service Infrastructure: CLARIAH-VL(+) and Open Science in action!
Abstract: This presentation introduces CLARIAH-VL, a project that aims to advance Digital Humanities research by establishing a robust DH infrastructure in Flanders (with partners UGent, UAntwerpen, KU Leuven, VUB and the Dutch Language Institute). During the period 2021-2024, CLARIAH-VL developed several high-quality and user-friendly DH tools or tool suites, the so-called Service Infrastructure Components (SICs). In this presentation, an overview of these SICs will be provided, spanning disciplines and DH methods such as Named Entity Linking, semantic annotation, TEI XML editing, topic detection and much more. Finally, this presentation will also highlight how the new project phase (under the acronym CLARIAH-VL+) will further develop its DH infrastructure and stays committed to Open Science and public engagement, not only by ensuring accessibility and alignment with European research infrastructures like CLARIN-ERIC and DARIAH-EU, but also by reaching out to other partners for Digital Humanities research in Flanders and beyond.

Session 2
Monday 28 April, 15h-16h30 CEST via Teams
Speaker(s): Roberta Pireddu, KU Leuven
Title: Enriching Cultural Heritage with AI: The AI4Culture Hackathon Journey (& A Glimpse into CrowdHeritage)
Abstract: In this presentation, I will share insights into the AI4Culture project, with a particular focus on the planning and execution of the AI4Cultural Hackathon—a one-week event held at KU Leuven in February 2025. I will discuss how the event was developed within the framework of the project, offering a behind-the-scenes look at the preparations, challenges faced, and lessons learned. Additionally, I will highlight the CrowdHeritage platform, showcasing its successful implementation in various events organized as part of other projects and participatory activities.

Session 3 – Special In-Person DH Benelux Session
Monday 26 May, 13h30-16h CEST
Location: room 1.10 Malachiet, Hoek 38, Leuvenseweg 38, Brussels (location is within walking distance from the central station)
Speaker(s): various members of our community
Format: elevator pitches of DH Benelux contributions

---

There are an increasing number of conferences, workshops, and funding opportunities in DH, and we would like to ensure that you are aware of them. We will start every session with a moment for individuals to share news about upcoming lectures, workshops, seminars, and conferences. We have a corresponding Slack group where we also share these opportunities both during the discussion group meetings and in between. The link to join the Slack group is included in every email sent out to the mailing list, so watch for it there or send us an email to request access.

If you would like to register or invite other colleagues to join, please complete the registration form for the mailing list here. Please note, if you have received emails from us about the Discussion Group in the past, it means you are already on our mailing list. In that case, there is no need to register again—you will receive the emails with the MS Teams link and any additional information on the day of the session. Additionally, you will also receive updates on upcoming sessions including further details about speakers and the “under-the-hood” presentation topics. 

Are you a frequent attendee of the DH Virtual Discussion Group and would like a low-threshold way to become more involved in the organization? We are looking for ambassadors to promote the group within their university networks. If this might be a role you would like to take on, get in touch and we can tell you more!

We look forward to seeing you this spring!

Are you a Digital Humanities student or early career researcher in Belgium who would like to discuss DH with other early career researchers in the Belgian DH community? If so, you might be interested in joining the DH Virtual Discussion Group for ECRs!

The DH Virtual Discussion Group is a joint initiative organized by individuals at three different Belgian institutions. We strive to involve speakers from various Belgian institutions and encourage participation from all those who are interested in DH and are located at any Belgian institution. This year, the core organizers are Leah Budke (KU Leuven Libraries Artes), Sven Lieber (KBR), Paavo van der Eecken (University of Antwerp), and Loren Verreyen (University of Antwerp). Over the past years, the series has become a regular event. The fall 2024 edition proudly marks our ninth term.

Our sessions this fall will continue the “under-the-hood” format, which entails a volunteer from our community providing a thirty-minute overview of a digital project implementing a given tool, approach, or platform. This is not meant to be a polished research presentation, or to present findings or results, but rather to give our community a behind-the-scenes look at how decisions were made and why specific tools were chosen or developed. The hope is also that this presenter will give attendees some ideas about how to get started implementing a specific tool or workflow, and that they can also answer questions or contribute to a discussion on other projects in our community that might be using similar methodologies or addressing similar issues. This “under-the-hood” session format allows us to have focused discussions around a specific project where we can learn from each other in an informal way. In addition, by implementing this format we can maintain the low threshold for contributing and engaging in the conversations. It also allows us to learn about the diverse projects being done in the Benelux region related to digital humanities (an added bonus!).   

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The following sessions are on the schedule for the fall 2024 semester (details will be updated as confirmed):

Session 1
Monday 21 October, 15h-16h30 CEST via Teams
Speaker(s): Leonardo Grotti, University of Antwerp
Title: Methodological Challenges and Innovations in Hearing Therapy Research: The MuLiSSA
Abstract: Disabling hearing loss (DHL) is a global concern, impacting millions and necessitating innovative solutions. In the pursuit of these solutions, hearing therapy research encounters methodological complexities that require careful consideration. This paper introduces the MuLiSSA project, which aims to address these challenges and advance hearing assessment and rehabilitation.

Our research targets the shift from traditional in-booth speech audiometry to self-administered assessments via wireless audio streaming, increasing accessibility across settings. We validate the feasibility of boothless self-testing, accounting for technical and environmental constraints.

To improve precision in speech audiometry, we explore techniques for identifying phoneme errors in patients, aiming to enhance personalized hearing device settings and rehabilitation outcomes. Additionally, we address multilingual speech testing to enable comparable scores across languages, breaking language barriers in hearing healthcare. We also discuss strategies for integrating diverse research methodologies, addressing interdisciplinary challenges, and managing funding complexities in methodologically diverse projects.

Session 2
Monday 25 November, 15h-16h30 CET via Teams
Speaker(s): Anthe Sevenants, KU Leuven
Title: The Sims for Research: The Merit of Using Computer Simulations
Abstract: As researchers, we sometimes have questions that are rather difficult to test empirically. Often, these are bold, far-reaching questions which, while ambitious, are simply impossible to operationalise. Usually, these restraints are of practical, financial or some other concern. In my talk, I propose a methodology which sidesteps these issues: computer simulations. With computer simulations, you can build your own virtual societies which you can establish in any way you like, a practice conceptually analogous to “The Sims” games. The idea is that in these simulations, you can distill social relations between people to just the mechanisms you are interested in as a researcher. In this virtual world free of noise, budget contraints or ethical commissions, you are free to change the rules according to which agents, virtual inhabitants, behave. In this way, you are able to test what the theoretical limits are to the specific behaviour or theories you are interested in.

While it is clear that computer simulations could be used for a plethora of different research questions within the humanities (i.e. history, archaeology), I will present how simulations can be used for the study of language change. To this end, I will explain the plans for a case study from my FWO project, which is centred around how computer simulations can help us understand how frequency of use shapes language change. I will give concrete examples of the types of questions I would like to answer with the computer simulations, which will give a better idea of the genre of questions this methodology is able to answer in the first place. At the same time, I will emphasise the shortcomings and pitfalls of computer simulations as a research tool, because unfortunately, unlike “The Sims”, good research has no cheat codes.

View Anthe’s presentation in our Zenodo community

Session 3
Monday 16 December, 15h-16h30 CET via Teams
Speaker(s): Fien Messens, Ghent University
Title: Raw to Refined: The Case of the Navez Project
Abstract: (Art) historical data can be tricky—often fragmented, incomplete, and curated—making it challenging to study the impact of key figures. However, the remaining data in 2024 offers valuable insights into earlier societies. In this presentation, I will address the challenges of identifying historical figures, such as artists, whose identities are often obscured by incomplete records or inconsistent name spellings. Together, we will explore how Digital Humanities methods, including Linked Open Data (LOD), can assist in contextualizing these individuals (and how not).

We’ll step back into the 19th century to examine the surviving data on Belgium’s most important neoclassical painter, François-Joseph Navez (1787-1869). This research is part of the FWO-funded Navez Project, a collaboration between Ghent University and KBR.

The slides from Fien’s presentation will be made available here after the meeting

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There are an increasing number of conferences, workshops, and funding opportunities in DH, and we would like to ensure that you are aware of them. We will start every session with a moment for individuals to share news about upcoming lectures, workshops, seminars, and conferences. We have a corresponding Slack group where we also share these opportunities both during the discussion group meetings and in between. The link to join the Slack group is included in every email sent out to the mailing list, so watch for it there or send us an email to request access.

If you would like to register or invite other colleagues to join, please complete the registration form for the mailing list here. Please note, if you have received emails from us about the Discussion Group in the past, it means you are already on our mailing list. In that case, there is no need to register again—you will receive the emails with the MS Teams link and any additional information on the day of the session. Additionally, you will also receive updates on upcoming sessions including further details about speakers and the “under-the-hood” presentation topics. 

Are you a frequent attendee of the DH Virtual Discussion Group and would like a low-threshold way to become more involved in the organization? We are looking for ambassadors to promote the group within their university networks. If this might be a role you would like to take on, get in touch and we can tell you more!

We look forward to seeing you this fall!

This fall, KU Leuven ICTS is offering a selection of online workshops focused on various softwares for working with data. If you have been hoping to learn more about Excel for use with quantitative data, LaTeX for more flexibility when it comes to the format of your academic writing, or Python for more advanced data science techniques (workshop requires knowledge of a previous programming language such as R), then you might be interested in one of the following workshops!

Excel – Basics module 1 (online)

• All info here
• What? By means of practical examples you will quickly become familiar with the basic techniques of Excel: Input, Editing, Formatting, Simple calculations.
• For whom? Anyone who is interested, regardless of their statute (PhD student, postdoc, scientific collaborator..). No prior knowledge of Excel required, but some experience with other Office programmes (Word, Outlook) comes in handy.
• Language: English
• By whom? KU Leuven central ICTS trainers
• When & where? Online via Teams, 2 half days: 14/11/2024: 9 a.m.-12.30 p.m. & 15/11/2024: 9 a.m.-12.30 p.m. – 19 places left!
• How much does it cost? It’s free of charge.
• How can I register? Via KU Loket, see workshop website.
• PS – For PhD students this counts for the requirement of minimum 12 hours of transferable skills training. More info here.

LaTeX introduction (online)

• All info here
• What? This introduction will teach you how to use an editor (TexnicCenter), create, compile and print a basic LaTeX document.
• For whom? Anyone who is interested, regardless of their statute (PhD student, postdoc, scientific collaborator..)
• Language: English
• By whom? KU Leuven central ICTS trainers
• When & where? Online via Teams, 2 half days: 20/11/2024: 9 a.m.-13.00 p.m. & 21/11/2024: 9 a.m.-13.00 p.m. – 13 places left!
• How much does it cost? It’s free of charge.
• How can I register? Via KU Loket, see workshop website.
• PS – For PhD students this counts for the requirement of minimum 12 hours of transferable skills training. More info here.

Python as a second language (online)

• All info here
• Please note that there are also several other Python courses, all of which require previous experience with Python: Python for data science, Python for HPC, Python for machine learning, Python-on-GPUs, Scientific Python.
• What? This training session introduces the programming language to participants who have programming experience with other programming languages such as R, MATLAB, C/C++ or Fortran.
• For whom? Anyone who is interested and who already has experience in another programming language (e.g. R).
• Language: English
• By whom? KU Leuven central ICTS trainers
• When & where? Online via Teams, 2 half days: 23/10/2024: 9 a.m.-12 p.m. & 24/10/2024: 9 a.m.-12 p.m. – 14 places left!
• How much does it cost? It’s free of charge.
• How can I register? Via KU Loket, see workshop website.
• PS – For PhD students this counts for the requirement of minimum 12 hours of transferable skills training. More info here.

Are you a Digital Humanities student or early career researcher in Belgium who would like to discuss DH with other early career researchers in the Belgian DH community? If so, you might be interested in joining the DH Virtual Discussion Group for ECRs!

The DH Virtual Discussion Group is a joint initiative organized by individuals at three different Belgian institutions. We strive to involve speakers from various Belgian institutions and encourage participation from all those who are interested in DH and are located at any Belgian institution. This semester, the core organizers are Prof. Margherita Fantoli (KU Leuven Faculty of Arts), Dr. Leah Budke (KU Leuven Libraries Artes), and Paavo van der Eecken (University of Antwerp). Over the past years, the series has become a regular event. The spring 2024 edition proudly marks our eighth term.

Our regular sessions this spring will continue the “under-the-hood” format, which entails a volunteer from our community providing a thirty-minute overview of a digital project implementing a given tool, approach, or platform. This is not meant to be a polished research presentation, or to present findings or results, but rather to give our community a behind-the-scenes look at how decisions were made and why specific tools were chosen or developed. The hope is also that this presenter will give attendees some ideas about how to get started implementing a specific tool or workflow, and that they can also answer questions or contribute to a discussion on other projects in our community that might be using similar methodologies or addressing similar issues. This “under-the-hood” session format allows us to have focused discussions around a specific project where we can learn from each other in an informal way. In addition, by implementing this format we can maintain the low threshold for contributing and engaging in the conversations. It also allows us to learn about the diverse projects being done in the Benelux region related to digital humanities (an added bonus!).

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The following sessions are on the schedule for the spring 2024 semester (details will be updated as confirmed):

Session 1
Monday 25 March, 15h-16h30 CET via Teams
Speaker(s): Nooshin Shahidzadeh Asadi, University of Antwerp
Title: “Developing Interoperable Open-Source Tools in the Digital Humanities: Merits and Complexities”
Abstract: For this session, Nooshin Asadi (PhD student, the University of Antwerp) will discuss her pivot from software engineering to pursuing a PhD in digital humanities and the changes it has brought about in her professional and academic life. She will talk about her experience with the occasionally harsh but ultimately rewarding reality of producing prototypical, open-source software in the world of DH, while examining in detail the current project she is working on (Axolotl, a real-time collaborative XML editor) and the challenges and opportunities she has faced throughout its development.
 See Nooshin’s slides in our Zenodo community

Session 2
Monday 29 April, 15h-16h30 CEST via Teams
Speaker(s): Kushal Jayesh Tatariya, KU Leuven
Title: Sociolinguistically Informed Interpretability: A Case Study in Hinglish Emotion Classification
Abstract: In this presentation, I will talk about my project that approaches the interpretability of language models in Natural Language Processing (NLP) from a sociolinguistic perspective. We apply this perspective to the task of emotion classification for code-mixed data. Studies have shown that Hinglish speakers switch to Hindi when expressing negative emotions and to English when expressing positive emotions. To understand if language models can learn these associations, we study the effect of language on emotion prediction across 3 pre-trained language models (PLMs) on a Hinglish emotion classification dataset. I will go into the details of our process of annotating the dataset, the tools we used for our interpretability analysis, and the challenges of working with such subjective data in a setting that demands objectivity. Through this process, we are able to conclude that language models do learn associations between language choice and emotional expression, and this learning can have an impact on model prediction. In conclusion, through a discussion about the results of this project, I would like to explore the general implications of leveraging linguistic theories to understand language models in NLP.
 Kushal’s slides will be shared here after the session

Session 3 – Special DH Benelux Session!
—Read more details about this special session in this blogpost—
Monday 27 May, 13h30-16h00 CEST live in Brussels and online via MS Teams
Speaker(s): Various from our DH community
 The presentation will be linked here after the session

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There are an increasing number of conferences, workshops, and funding opportunities in DH, and we would like to ensure that you are aware of them. We will start every session with a moment for individuals to share news about upcoming lectures, workshops, seminars, and conferences. We have a corresponding Slack group where we also share these opportunities both during the discussion group meetings and in between. The link to join the Slack group is included in every email sent out to the mailing list, so watch for it there or send us an email to request access.

If you would like to register or invite other colleagues to join, please complete the registration form for the mailing list here. Please note, if you have received emails from us about the Discussion Group in the past, it means you are already on our mailing list. In that case, there is no need to register again—you will receive the emails with the MS Teams link and any additional information on the day of the session. Additionally, you will also receive updates on upcoming sessions including further details about speakers and the “under-the-hood” presentation topics. 

Are you a frequent attendee of the DH Virtual Discussion Group and would like a low-threshold way to become more involved in the organization? We are looking for ambassadors to promote the group within their university networks. If this might be a role you would like to take on, get in touch and we can tell you more!

We look forward to seeing you this spring!

Are you a Digital Humanities student or early career researcher in Belgium who would like to discuss DH with other early career researchers in the Belgian DH community? If so, you might be interested in joining the DH Virtual Discussion Group for ECRs!

The DH Virtual Discussion Group is a joint initiative organized by individuals at three different Belgian institutions. We strive to involve speakers from various Belgian institutions and encourage participation from all those who are interested in DH and are located at any Belgian institution. This year, the core organizers are Prof. Margherita Fantoli (KU Leuven Faculty of Arts), Dr. Leah Budke (KU Leuven Libraries Artes), Dr. Sven Lieber (KBR), and Paavo van der Eecken (University of Antwerp). Over the past years, the series has become a regular event. The fall 2023 edition proudly marks our seventh term.

Our sessions this fall will continue the “under-the-hood” format, which entails a volunteer from our community providing a thirty-minute overview of a digital project implementing a given tool, approach, or platform. This is not meant to be a polished research presentation, or to present findings or results, but rather to give our community a behind-the-scenes look at how decisions were made and why specific tools were chosen or developed. The hope is also that this presenter will give attendees some ideas about how to get started implementing a specific tool or workflow, and that they can also answer questions or contribute to a discussion on other projects in our community that might be using similar methodologies or addressing similar issues. This “under-the-hood” session format allows us to have focused discussions around a specific project where we can learn from each other in an informal way. In addition, by implementing this format we can maintain the low threshold for contributing and engaging in the conversations. It also allows us to learn about the diverse projects being done in the Benelux region related to digital humanities (an added bonus!).   

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The following sessions are on the schedule for the fall 2023 semester (details will be updated as confirmed):

Session 1
Monday 23 October, 15h-16h30 CEST via Teams
Speaker(s): Sergio Alonso Mislata, Volunteer at KBR, CAMille Project
Title: CAMille at KBR: first steps of a project on Belgian journalists
Abstract: In this presentation, Sergio (MA in Information and Library Studies at Aberystwyth University) will summarise the main goals and processes established during his volunteering experience at KBR within the CAMille project. CAMille, founded in 2020 (ULB-KBR), is the (Belgian) Centre for Archives on the Media and Information. Two main research projects are currently carried out at CAMille: On the one hand, writing a history of Belgian journalism from the end of the 19th century to the present day, from a specific angle: the study of critical discourses. On the other hand, developing a database of Belgian journalists and media since 1830. This presentation will touch upon the latter.
 View Sergio’s presentation slides in the DH VDG Zenodo Community

Session 2
Monday 27 November, 15h-16h30 CET via Teams
Speaker(s): Prof. Hilde De Weerdt (KU Leuven), Dr. Sunkyu Lee (KU Leuven), Dr. Sander Molenaar (IISG), Dr. Taylor Zaneri (IISH), Ms. Wangzhi Xi (PhD student, KU Leuven)
Title: Analysing Regions through the Digital History of Infrastructures
Abstract: This talk will introduce two digital research projects–Regionalizing Infrastructures in Chinese History (Reginfra) and The Lives and Afterlives of Imperial Material Infrastructure in Southeastern China (InfraLives). Both projects investigate how large-scale infrastructures, such as city walls, bridges, and roads, affected regional (dis)integration in the Chinese and neighboring territories from roughly 1000 to 1900. One of the key objectives is to explore the spatial patterns of infrastructures, including their construction, maintenance, destruction, failure, uses, and cultural meanings across different regions. Based on empirical data derived from digitized texts, the projects aim to critically examine assumptions about the relation between infrastructures and regional integration and to develop dynamic models of regional histories. The presenters will discuss methods in corpus building and text and image annotation, and explain future plans for comparative spatial analysis and machine learning.
View the presentation slides in the DH VDG Zenodo Community

Session 3
Monday 18 December, 15h-16h30 CET via Teams
Speaker(s): Mona Allaert, University of Antwerp
Title: From Hieroglyphs to Hyperlinks: Introducing Digital Humanities to Bachelor Students
Abstract: For this session, Mona Allaert (teaching assistant at the University of Antwerp), will discuss the hurdles encountered when developing and teaching the module “Digital Literacy”, a new course followed by second-year bachelor students of Linguistics and Literature. She’ll delve into the unique challenges of instructing a technically focused subject to a largely non-technical audience. Additionally, she’ll shed light on the practical learning labs that complement theoretical lessons, designed to offer students an engaging introduction to hands-on digital humanities. As the course’s second edition is underway, the discussion will revolve around adjustments made based on valuable feedback received from the previous year’s students.
View Mona’s presentation slides in the DH VDG Zenodo Community

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There are an increasing number of conferences, workshops, and funding opportunities in DH, and we would like to ensure that you are aware of them. We will start every session with a moment for individuals to share news about upcoming lectures, workshops, seminars, and conferences. We have a corresponding Slack group where we also share these opportunities both during the discussion group meetings and in between. The link to join the Slack group is included in every email sent out to the mailing list, so watch for it there or send us an email to request access.

If you would like to register or invite other colleagues to join, please complete the registration form for the mailing list here. Please note, if you have received emails from us about the Discussion Group in the past, it means you are already on our mailing list. In that case, there is no need to register again—you will receive the emails with the MS Teams link and any additional information on the day of the session. Additionally, you will also receive updates on upcoming sessions including further details about speakers and the “under-the-hood” presentation topics. 

Are you a frequent attendee of the DH Virtual Discussion Group and would like a low-threshold way to become more involved in the organization? We are looking for ambassadors to promote the group within their university networks. If this might be a role you would like to take on, get in touch and we can tell you more!

 

We look forward to seeing you this fall!

The Sherman Centre for Digital Scholarship at McMaster University is pleased to announce that “DS Bytes: A Lunchtime Speaker Series” is now open for registration! The lectures are open to all:  register for all sessions here.

Program

This six-part series includes events on data, artificial intelligence, critical literacy, and social justice. All events have virtual attendance options. 

The full slate includes:

• January 19: “Glitch: Disability, Feminism, Technology” by Adan Jerreat-Poole (Assistant Professor of Communication Studies, University of Waterloo)
• January 31: “How to Lie with Data” panel featuring McMaster University’s Vass Bednar (Director, Public Policy in Digital Society), Cal Biruk (Associate Professor of Anthropology), Jeffrey Demaine (Bibliometrics and Research Impact Librarian), Saman Goudarzi (Cartographic Resources Librarian), Christine Homuth (Spatial Information Specialist), and Subhanya Sivajothy (Data Analysis and Visualization Librarian)
• February 8: “The Value of Visuals in Science Communication” by Mark Belan (Scientific Graphics Journalist)
• February 14: “Urban Heat Islands and Social Inequities: A Data-Driven Story” by Isabelle Bouchard (Data Scientist) and Nael Shiab (Senior Data Producer, CBC)
• March 1: “How to Lie with Visualization” by Gabby Resch (Assistant Professor of Business and Information Technology, Ontario Tech University)
• March 21: “E.Q. vs I.Q.: Testing Artificial Intelligence in Apple’s Siri” by Lai-Tze Fan (Assistant Professor of Sociology & Legal Studies and English Literature, University of Waterloo)

Practical details

• When: January 19 to March 21
• Where: every session can be followed online
• Price: free
• Registration: click here, event URL will be sent via registration email

More info

The Sherman Centre also has a repository of 70+ event recordings, asynchronous webinars, and text guides on Digital Scholarship methods, topics, and approaches including social media research ethics, podcasting, and more.

Over the next months CAMille (ULB-KBR), the Data Science Lab (VUB-KBR), the Digital Research Lab (UGent – KBR), and LabEL (UCLouvain-KBR) will co-organise a three-part series of webinars on Digital Humanities and lexical semantic change.

Lexical semantic change, a phenomenon describing the evolution of the meanings of lexical units, has long preoccupied historical linguists. The possibility to study this phenomenon with computational methods has far reaching implications in several disciplines since diachronic semantic change can be used to identify conceptual shifts in questions related to many aspects of society such as culture, religion, politics, economics and morality. The recent convergence of Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics with a range of humanities disciplines has led questions related to lexical semantic change to gain momentum.

During the series, we will hear from three timely projects which are pushing the boundaries of Digital Humanities by creating synergies between disciplines to develop cutting-edge methods to investigate lexical semantic change at a large scale.

Programme

18.10.2022

Nina Tahmasebi (Göteborgs universitet) & Simon Hengchen : “Change is Key!”

Nina Tahmasebi and Simon Hengchen talk about the “Change is Key!” program, a 6-year research program where methods for semantic change and lexical variation are combined to answer research questions stemming from humanities and social sciences

08/11/2022

Justyna Robinson (University of Sussex): Concept-led approach to semantic change.

In this talk Justyna Robinson presents a perspective on semantic change in terms of paradigmatic relations across a text. She discusses the findings from the Linguistic DNA research project which analysed concepts in discourse of 55,000 Early Modern English books. She presents the most recent theoretical and methodological innovations, which include bottom-up modelling of prosodic meaning.

08/12/2022

Florentina Armaselu (University of Luxembourg): “Bridging NLP and LLOD: Humanities Approaches to Semantic Change”.

The talk presents an overview of theoretical aspects, natural language processing (NLP) techniques and linguistic linked open data (LLOD) formalisms that can be considered together for analysing and representing semantic change from a humanistic prespective. It focuses on a project developed as a humanities use case within the COST Action “Nexus Linguarum – European network for Web-centred linguistic data science.”

Practical details:

• When: 18/10/2022, 08/11/2022 and 08/12/2022, from 14h00 to 15h30.
• Where: Online
• Price: Free
• Registration: Registration is mandatory. The morning of the event you will be sent the link to the meeting and the etiquette to follow.
• Link: For more information, see the KBR website

Are you an early career researcher in the field of Digital Humanities or a student interested in DH approaches who would like to discuss DH with other early career researchers in the Belgian DH community? If so, you might be interested in joining the DH Virtual Discussion Group for ECRs! 

Our sessions this fall will continue the “under-the-hood” format. In these sessions, a volunteer from our community provides a thirty-minute overview of a digital project which implements a given tool, approach, or platform. This is not meant to be a research presentation, or to present findings or results, but rather to give our community a behind-the-scenes look at how decisions were made and why specific tools were chosen or developed. The hope is also that this presenter will give attendees some ideas about how to get started implementing a specific tool or workflow, and that they can also answer questions about other related ongoing projects that are implementing similar functionalities. This “under-the-hood” session format will allow us to have focused discussions around a specific project where we can learn from each other in an informal way. In addition, by implementing this format we can maintain the low threshold for contributing and engaging in the conversations. It also allows us to learn about the diverse projects in the Benelux region related to digital humanities! (An added bonus!)  

If you would like to join us for the fall edition, please mark your calendars for the following dates (check back for updated information concerning titles and abstracts):   

1 – Monday 24 October from 15h – 16h30 CEST via MS Teams

Speaker: Paavo Van der Eecken from the University of Antwerp
Title of Presentation: “Viewing Between the Lines: Annotating Sensitive Attributes in Illustrated Children’s Literature”
Abstract: In recent years, awareness has been growing about the importance of diversity in children’s literature. Yet, when it comes to historical literature, the argument is often “that’s what the times were like”. The implicit assumption is that all children’s literature back then was similarly racist and/or sexist. Recent research, however, has revealed that the historical literary production for children was not as monolithic as that argument seems to suggest.

In the context of historical Dutch-language children’s literature, we still lack an overview of how representation plays out within the books, especially when it comes to the illustrations – a vital part of those stories. With this research project we aim to fill that gap, by analyzing patterns of representation along the lines of age, race, class, and gender. As a first step, we have annotated all human characters in the illustrations of one thousand children’s books published between 1800 and 1940 and assigned them attributes according to the four axes under study.

During the under-the-hood session we will discuss the decision-making processes underlying those annotations. We will pay particular attention to the data preprocessing, the tools that were selected, the use of external annotators and the specific categories and labels that were applied while annotating.

2 – Monday 14 November from 15h – 16h30 CET via MS Teams

Speaker: Houda Lamqaddam from the University of Liège and KU Leuven
Title of Presentation:  “Digital Satellites in Humanities Research”
Abstract: Though the argument for digital tools in humanistic research has been growing, they are often appreciated based on their validity in addressing specific research questions. In order to properly assess their effective value to the field, a more long-term assessment is needed. In this talk, I will present the concept of Digital Satellites in humanistic Research. Through the analogy with artificial satellites, I interrogate the short and long-term function of digital tools in DH by looking beyond their instrumental phase, into their lifecycle in its entirety. I will use concrete examples of the Cornelia digital art history project infrastructure to show how the proposed design principles can be applied.

3 – Monday 19 December from 15h – 16h30 CET  via MS Teams

Speaker: Laura Soffiantini from KU Leuven
Title of Presentation: “Yet there is pattern in’t!” Studying formulaic expressions in Latin funerary epigraphy.
Abstract: Romans inscribed hundreds of thousands of texts on stone. Laws, treaties, but also curses, and love poems were written on rigid supports and displayed to the public. But the kind of epigraphic texts that most copiously came down to us is private inscriptions commemorating the loss of a loved one. Generally reduced to a few lines, Latin tomb texts conveyed biographical information about the commemorated person in a highly standardized form.

The content of funerary inscriptions is largely formulaic. The same expressions and vocabulary are repeated in hundreds of texts to express feelings of attachment, love, or grief. Some of the Latin formulas became so popular over the centuries that are still in use nowadays. Despite the apparent uniformity of the texts, a closer look reveals significant variations in the use and combinations of formulas. With my talk, I aim to illustrate the potentialities offered by formulaic identification methods to investigate large corpora of formalized texts. I will demonstrate that the use of text analysis techniques will permit us to overcome the challenges posed by the redundant nature of epigraphic texts. Moreover, I will show to what extent the application of semantic network analysis provides a flexible approach to discovering communication patterns in Latin inscriptions. In conclusion, I will discuss the strategies to explore the dynamic relations between formulaic expressions in texts.

Some practical matters and registration:  

All of our sessions this fall will be held on MS Teams, and you will receive the link to the virtual meeting room on the day of the discussion.   

There are an increasing number of conferences, workshops, and funding opportunities in DH, and we would like to ensure that you are aware of them. We will start every session with a moment for individuals to share news about upcoming lectures, workshops, seminars, and conferences; and we will include an extra box on the Padlet (a link to the Padlet will be communicated in the email before the session) where you can also post these.   

If you would like to register or invite other colleagues to join, please fill in the registration form for the mailing list here. Please note, if you have already received email correspondence about previous editions of our DH Virtual Discussion Group, it means you are already on our mailing list. In that case, there is no need to register again—you will receive the emails with the MS Teams link and any additional materials on the day of the session. Additionally, you will also receive updates on upcoming sessions including further details about speakers and the “under-the-hood” presentation topics.  

Are you a Dutch speaker who needs to transcribe old or new hand-written materials, or do optical character recognition (OCR) on print materials? Check out this upcoming webinar on Transkribus in Dutch, taking place on May 31, 2022, at 16h CEST:

Dit webinar van Dr. Annemieke Romein geeft een overzicht van de basis van Transkribus in het Nederlands. U leert hoe u documenten upload naar Transkribus, de lay-out analyse uitvoert, handmatige transcripties doet om trainingsdata te genereren, hoe u de geautomatiseerde herkenning gebruikt, welke publieke modellen we aanbieden, hoe de training van uw eigen model werkt en hoe u uw documenten kunt doorzoeken op speciale woorden en zinsdelen. We zullen de workflow stap voor stap doornemen en u krijgt de kans om vragen te stellen via de chat.

U hoeft zich niet te registreren om deel te nemen aan dit webinar (het zal ongeveer 45 minuten duren plus tijd voor vragen), u kunt er toegang toe krijgen via deze link: https://youtu.be/xe-OTS48FK

On March 28^th (2pm, CEST) the Academia Europaea Cardiff, KU Leuven Libraries and the Young Academy of Europe jointly organize a webinar about “The Diamond Open Access Model: what impact on research?”. The webinar is free and open to all, the registration form can be found here. During this one-hour webinar, an expert panel will explain and discuss the latest developments in Open Access publishing and what it means for researchers, research-intensive institutions, learned societies, libraries and other publishers. There will be plenty of time for the audience to interact and pose questions to the panel.

Panel

• Professor Johan Rooryck, Executive Director, Coalition S
• Professor Sarah de Rijcke, Professor in Science, Technology, and Innovation Studies & Scientific Director at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS), Leiden University
• Dr Bregt Saenen, Senior Policy Officer for Open Science, Science Europe
• Professor Toma Susi, University of Vienna, Member of the Scientific Advisory Board, Open Research Europe
• Professor Demmy Verbeke, Professor of Open Scholarship and Head of KU Leuven Libraries Artes

The webinar will be chaired by Professor Ole Petersen, Honorary Vice-President, Academia Europaea.

Webinar description

With escalating Article Processing Charges (APCs) under the Gold Open Access Model, attention has been turning to the Diamond Model, where scientific articles are not subject to APCs. Diamond journals represent a large percentage of open access publishing output and are mostly owned and managed by universities, learned societies and other not-for-profit organisations.

Two organisations leading the development of an international strategy on Open Access, Science Europe and Coalition S, have recently launched an initiative that will offer worldwide support to building and sustaining the Diamond Model. The action plan was published on 2nd March.

Are you an early career researcher in the field of Digital Humanities or a student interested in DH approaches who would like to discuss DH with other early career researchers in the Belgian DH community? If so, you might be interested in joining the DH Virtual Discussion Group for ECRs! This series is jointly organized by KU Leuven Libraries Artes Research and the Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities.  

Our first two sessions this spring will continue the “under-the-hood” format. In these sessions, a volunteer from our community provides a thirty-minute overview of a digital project which implements a given tool, approach, or platform. This is not meant to be a research presentation, or to present findings or results, but rather to give our community a behind-the-scenes look at how decisions were made and why specific tools were chosen or developed. The hope is also that this presenter will give attendees some ideas about how to get started implementing a specific tool or workflow, and that they can also answer questions about other, related ongoing projects that are implementing similar functionalities. This “under-the-hood” session format will allow us to have focused discussions around a specific project where we can learn from each other in an informal way. In addition, by implementing this format we can maintain the low threshold for contributing and engaging in the conversations. It also allows us to learn about the diverse projects in the Benelux region related to digital humanities! (An added bonus!)  

Our final session of the spring edition will be a special DH Benelux session. This is our second year running this special session, where members of our community who will also be presenting in some form at the 2022 DH Benelux conference (conference paper, poster, workshop) are invited to give an elevator pitch of their DH Benelux contribution. These elevator pitches serve a dual purpose: they let the presenter practice presenting their material in advance of the conference, but they also let our DH community get a taste of what to expect at the DH Benelux conference.    

If you would like to join us for the spring edition, please mark your calendars for the following dates:   

1 – Monday 21 March from 15h – 16h30 CET  

Speaker: Gianluca Valenti from the University of Liège
Title of presentation: “Modern Letters and Text Analysis: The ‘EpistolarITA’ Project“
Abstract: The growth of interest in epistolary texts over the last few decades has led to a flourishing of international research projects devoted to cataloguing, editing, and studying modern letters, in a collective and coordinated effort to better understand these materials. In this context, at the University of Liège, a database has been launched, through which users are able to perform statistical analyses on a large epistolary corpus of letters. The algorithm uses techniques such as TF-IDF, Word2Vec, and Named-Entity Recognition to help users to discover new connections, explore new avenues of research, and find new interpretations in the network of the Republic of letters. 

2 – Monday 25 April from 15h – 16h30 CEST  

Speaker: Montaine Denys from the Flanders Heritage Libraries
Title: ”Managing the Evaluation of OCR Quality in Flemish Newspaper Collections”
Abstract: The OCR quality of digitised historical newspapers can greatly impact their findability and usability. Over the past year, the Flanders Heritage Libraries has worked together with meemoo, the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin and ten other partner organisations in order to evaluate the current OCR quality of Flemish digitised newspaper collections, as well as their potential for improvement. In this session Montaine Denys will delve into the coordination of this project. More concretely she will focus on the project workflow, the creation of a ground truth dataset, interpreting the results, the challenges faced and the lessons learned.

3 – Monday 23 May from 15h – 16h30 CEST  

Topic: Special DH Benelux Session
Format: Elevator pitches
Presenters: Volunteers from our DH community (tbc) 

Some practical matters and registration:  

All of our sessions will again be held on Zoom, and you will receive the link to the virtual meeting room on the day of the discussion.   

There are an increasing number of conferences, workshops, and funding opportunities in DH, and we would like to ensure that you are aware of them. We will start every session with a moment for individuals to share news about upcoming lectures, workshops, seminars, and conferences; and we will include an extra box on the Padlet (a link to the Padlet will be communicated in the email before the session) where you can also post these.   

If you would like to register or invite other colleagues to join, please fill out the registration form for the mailing list here. Please note, if you have already received email correspondence about the Spring 2022 series, it means you are already on our mailing list. In that case, there is no need to register again—you will receive the emails with the Zoom link and any additional materials on the day of the session. Additionally, you will also receive updates on upcoming sessions including further details about speakers and the “under-the-hood” presentation topics.  

How can I present my own work?  

For those of you who would like an opportunity to share your DH ideas and projects, we hope you will consider volunteering for a future DH Virtual Discussion Group meeting. You do not need to be an expert to present: you can be the PI, a researcher, a PhD candidate, or a master’s student. Please use this as an opportunity to present your work at any stage. ALL are welcome to share and receive feedback. We want to stress that projects presented in the context of the DH Virtual Discussion Group should be given and received in a welcoming environment where we do not judge each other harshly, but rather provide encouragement, advice, and on-topic questions. If you are planning to present at DH Benelux this year (1-3 June 2022) and would like to do an elevator pitch, we would love to hear from you. Moreover, if you would like to support our community by giving a presentation about a tool, project, or workflow that you have used or developed, please also get in touch (leah.budke@kuleuven.be, margherita.fantoli@kuleuven.be, or julie.birkholz@ugent.be) and let us know you are interested.  

On Monday 13 December the third session of the DH Virtual Discussion Group for Early Career Researchers in Belgium will take place (via Zoom at 15:00-16:30 CET).  

Next Monday’s speaker is Dr. Rudy Jos Beerens from KU Leuven, whose “Under-the-Hood” presentation is titled “From Archival Source to Structured Data: A Practical Introduction to Project Cornelia’s (Slow) Digital Art History.” The following abstract provides an overview of Jos’s research interests and his planned talk for our discussion group:  

In this session, Rudy Jos Beerens (KU Leuven) discloses how Project Cornelia – an ongoing digital art history project led by Koenraad Brosens (www.projectcornelia.be) – translates messy archival sources into structured data suitable for computational analysis. This will be done in three parts. In the first part, Jos will briefly present Project Cornelia’s mission to come to a more inclusive understanding of early modern Flemish “art worlds.” In the second part, he will discuss how the Cornelia relational database was developed to accomplish this mission and take a closer look at how this database translates written archival records into usable and structured data. Finally, in the third part, Jos will demonstrate how the collected data can then be analyzed using existing tools such as MySQL and Gephi and the custom-build tool NAHR. 

If you would like to register for this session, you can do so by joining our mailing list. If you have already registered for our mailing list, then there is no need to register again—you are already receiving all our updates and will receive the link to join the Zoom meeting on Monday 13 December.   

If you know any Belgian early career researchers who might be interested in attending our discussion group series, please direct them to our registration page. All are welcome to attend! We strive to maintain an informal atmosphere where even those with little to no DH expertise can feel comfortable learning and participating in the discussion. We welcome those with more developed expertise as well. The sessions provide a wonderful opportunity for our Belgian DH community to come together, to network, and to learn from one another. We do hope you’ll join us!  

The series is jointly organized by Prof. Julie Birkholz (Ghent University and KBR), Prof. Margherita Fantoli (KU Leuven), and Dr. Leah Budke (KU Leuven). Questions can be addressed to leah.budke@kuleuven.be or julie.birkholz@ugent.be.  

  

 

On Monday 22 November the second session of the DH Virtual Discussion Group for Early Career Researchers in Belgium will take place (via Zoom at 15:00-16:30 CET). This session follows on a successful first session of the Fall edition where we had an attendance of 27 individuals from the Belgian DH community. We are certain the next session will be as engaging and interesting as the first! 

Monday’s speaker is Dr. Joren Six from Ghent University, whose “Under-the-Hood” presentation is titled “Demystifying Deep Learning: Automatically Labeling a Corpus of Field Recordings.” The following abstract provides an overview of Joren’s research interests and his planned talk for our discussion group: 

During the last decade learning based algorithms have improved significantly. Advances in computer vision are the prime example. These advances offer tantalizing prospects also for DH research. Unfortunately it is hard to apply these techniques, even if your DH research problem falls well within the capabilities of these algorithms. In this talk the aim is to demystify these techniques and how advances in image recognition can be used in practice for automatically labeling corpora.  More concretely I will focus on an application to label short fragments of field recordings into ‘speech’ ‘solo singing’ ‘group singing’ or ‘instrumental music’. 

If you would like to register for this session, you can do so by joining our mailing list. If you have already registered for our mailing list, then there is no need to register again—you are already receiving all our updates and will receive the link to join the Zoom meeting on Monday 22 November.  

If you know any early career researchers who might be interested in attending our discussion group series, please direct them to our registration page. All are welcome to attend! We strive to maintain an informal atmosphere where even those with little to no DH expertise can feel comfortable learning and participating in the discussion. We welcome those with more developed expertise as well. The sessions provide a wonderful opportunity for our Belgian DH community to come together, to network, and to learn from one another. We do hope you’ll join us! 

The series is jointly organized by Prof. Julie Birkholz (Ghent University and KBR), Prof. Margherita Fantoli (KU Leuven), and Dr. Leah Budke (KU Leuven). Questions can be addressed to leah.budke@kuleuven.be or julie.birkholz@ugent.be. 

 

On 6 and 7 May 2021, the Royal Library of Belgium (KBR) – together with several institutions including KU Leuven – will hold an international webinar on Old Books and New Technologies: Medieval Books and the Digital Humanities in the Low Countries. It will bring together researchers from libraries, archives, and museums, and university faculties with an interest in how the medieval book is contextualized by new technologies, with particular emphasis placed on the intersection of the medieval book and Digital Humanities. The languages of the conference will be English, Dutch, and French. For more information, keep reading!

This event is free and will include many interest talks (including two keynotes) from researchers across Belgium and the Netherlands, including from the Faculty of Arts and KU Leuven Libraries.

From the event website: “Over the course of the Middle Ages, what was called the Low Countries developed an original written culture. It is known to us through sources in Latin, in Middle Dutch and in Old and Middle French. At first centred in the Benedictine and Cistercian abbeys of Egmond and Friesland in the North or the Dunes, Ghent and the closely connected chain of Lobbes – Gembloux – Liège in the South, it increasingly became a town phenomenon following the development of the largest and most dense urban conglomeration in the European Middle Ages both with large towns like Ghent, Bruges, Tournai, Liège, Brussels, Antwerp, Leuven, ‘s-Hertogenbosch, Utrecht and a series of smaller cities scattered over the area, all with their convents, and, consequently, books.

In the 15^th century, the production of luxury manuscripts for the Burgundian court and its environment flourished in Bruges, Ghent, Oudenaarde, Brussels and Tournai, which gave rise to the development of an important pictorial culture. At the same time, the presence of towns, cathedrals and chapters all over the area gave rise to the rise of the famous French-Flemish school of polyphony, the works of which often have come down to us in beautifully executed manuscripts.

The urban character of the region in the later Middle Ages was essential in the development and expansion of such phenomena as the Devotio moderna or early Humanism. When the latter was essential in the spread of Latin schools and the amount of 15^th-century editions of classical Latin authors in the IJssel region, the first found its expression in a proper network of convents and libraries, which is highlighted by the ‘Red Cloister Register’, the famous collective catalogue compiled in the early sixteenth century.

All this produced an important heritage of medieval books, manuscripts and incunabula as well as the sources for their history up to the eighteenth century (old library inventories, pre-modern bio-bibliographical sources, accounts of literary journeys, etc.).”

You can view the program here and you can register for the event here.

Source: The Digital Humanities Commons blog: Event – Old Books and New Technologies: Medieval Books and the Digital Humanities in the Low Countries

Looking for a simple but powerful tool to organize images for your research? Tropy is a free and open source program that is very much worth considering. You can attend a free webinar on Tropy on February 24:

This webinar will offer an introduction to Tropy, a free desktop software that allows you to organize and describe photos of archival research material. Directed toward historians, social science researchers, and students, the session will cover the basics of getting started in Tropy, recording relevant information about your materials, and annotating and tagging sources. Learn how to bring order to your research process—and spend more time using your research photos, and less time searching for them. To learn more about Tropy and download the application, visit tropy.org.

Registration: Introduction to Tropy: a Digital Tool for Organizing Archival Research Photos

Source: Introduction to Tropy: a Digital Tool for Organizing Archival Research Photos • European University Institute