Digital historian | PhD-candidate | Mining historical texts, war, and emotions at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam | Working mainly in R

Workshop Text Mining in Luxembourg

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Gerben Zaagsma (C2DH, University of Luxembourg) invited Ralf Futselaar and me to organise a workshop ‘Introduction to Text Mining in R and RStudio’ at the University of Luxembourg.

Machine readable text corpora are increasingly available to humanities researchers, as well as a growing variety of digital techniques to extract information from this data. The purpose of this introduction to Text Mining and Word Embedding Models in R was to familiarize participants of the workshop with these techniques and to help them incorporate them in their methodological workflow. The workshop outlined the basic steps and methodological considerations the participants needed to start their own Text Mining research project.

We used a digitized version of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novels and stories as our test dataset. We discussed downloading, loading, and pre-processing textual data within the R environment. We also payed attention to different analytical text mining techniques, ranging from relative simple word counts and weighting schemes to analyzing keywords in context and training and using Word Embedding Models.

Negotiating Displacement: New Perspectives and Connections in War, Migration and Refugee Studies

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This conference was organised by my colleagues and me from the NIOD War and Society research program, IMIS (University of Osnabrück) and Movies that Matter. It was aimed at connecting scholars working on war, mass violence and genocide with researchers working in the field of migration studies in order to deepen the dialogue between two disciplines that often look at similar phenomena but from different perspectives.

Flying University of Transnational Humanities in South Korea

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In the summer of 2019 I attended the 9th Flying University of Transnational Humanities (FUTH) at the Sogang University in Seoul, South Korea. I presented a paper-in-progress on references to World War II in Dutch parliamentary debates on the Indonesian war of independence (1945-1949).

Research Fellowship in Luxembourg

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For three months, I worked as a PhD Research Fellow at the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH). During this fellowship I was part of the Impresso project team at C²DH. The NIOD blog published a miniseries of three blogs about my experiences and more about the Impresso research pilot can be found here.

Research trip to Japan (2)

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With my PhD-supervisor dr. Ralf Futselaar I went to Kwansei Gakuin Univesity in Nishinomiya, Japan to visit prof. dr. Yasuto Nakano. We received a grant from the Kwansei Gakuin University Invited Researcher Fund to work together with Yasuto Nakano on, among other things, comparative text mining using Japanese and Dutch digitized parliamentary proceedings. Together with prof. Nakano’s students we organized a small seminar to discuss the application of text mining techniques within various fields, ranging from sociology to history.