Project Name | Start Date | End Date |
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Walewein ende Keye | 2009 | 2011 |
- Description
- This website contains a critical edition of the thirteenth-century Arthurian romance Walewein ende Keye. The edition includes an introduction and a text with annotations. Van Walewein ende Keye has also published a printed edition. The caption is: Walewein ende Keye. A thirteenth-century Arthurian romance narrated in the Lancelot compilation. Edited with introduction and commentary by Marjolein Hogenbirk, involving W.P.Gerritsen. Lost, Hilversum 2011. Middle Dutch Lancelot Romans X.
- Disciplines
- Literary Studies
- Institutions
Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands (Collaboration) - Persons
M. Hogenbirk (Researcher) W. Gerritsen (Researcher)
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WAHSP; Web application for Historical Sentiment in Public Media | 2012 | - |
- Description
- WAHSP/BILAND is a research tool for historians that uses textual data of news media from the period 1863-1940 of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek and Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin as input material. One can search with single query terms or with combinations thereof. Apart from showing the articles that match the query, the results can be visualized by word clouds of single articles together with sentiment words highlighted, or by a word cloud of the whole result set together with newspaper statistics derived from their metadata.
Background
WAHSP/BILAND enables historians to collect and process large bi-lingual (Dutch and German) sets of opinionated text-data from news media and extract discourse identity and intensity patterns in two different countries with different scripts (e.g. Latin and Gothic). This tool offers a unique opportunity for non-technical humanities researchers to perform a new kind of historical e-research for studying changing opinions, notions and perceptions regarding public health and policy issues.
The text mining tools for opinion/sentiment extraction that form the technological base for WAHSP/BILAND have been developed within the NTU/STEVIN DuOMAn project. The technology includes algorithms and tools for identification of polarity (positive/support or negative/criticism), sources (opinion-holders), frequency of items and specific targets of discourses. The tools and subjectivity lexicons are implemented as modules of ‘Fietstas’ 2, an web service for text analysis. Fietstas also provides other essential text processing modules (morphological normalization, format and encoding reconciliation, named entity recognition and normalization, etc.) and visualization modules (interactive word clouds and timelines). Fietstas has been developed and is being used for processing of large-scale datasets in the context of several projects, such as DuOMAn. A text translation service based on Machine Learning can be used to translate existing lexicons and documents between Dutch and German (both directions).
The web application uses this functionality of Fietstas to leverage interactive creation, expansion and refinement of lexicons specific to the user’s research questions and needs. For BILAND new bilingual and biscriptural lexicons have been developed. The application uses the visualization features of Fietstas to allow users to examine the research domain along the dimensions of time, context, and the identity and frequency of the discourse. WAHSP/BILAND is meant to be generic and testable in all domains, where analysis of topics, contexts and attitudes in large volumes of text is needed.
- Disciplines
- History
History of science
- Institutions
Royal Library Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands Universiteit Utrecht Universiteit van Amsterdam - Persons
T. Pieters S. Snelders D. Odijk F. Laan
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VU-DNC - VU Diachronic newspaper corpus | 2011 | 2012 |
- Description
- The VU-DNC project has four main aims: 1) to make a unique diachronic corpus of Dutch newspaper articles from five major Dutch newspapers from 1950/1951 and 2002 (2 MW) available to the community of researchers in the humanities, 2) to extend the linguistic annotation of discourse with encoding for lexico-grammatical features of subjectivity and quotations, 3) to create a gold standard benchmark that can be used for testing and training OCR-postcorrection tools, by aligning uncorrected and corrected versions of the digitized printed newspaper articles from 1950/51, and 4) to improve the development of metadata within CLARIN by mapping the data categories for the part of speech and lemma coding to the data category registry, and extending the ISOcat categories for the historical spelling variation, subjectivity and quotations.
- Disciplines
- Media Studies
Computer Science History
- Institutions
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam - Persons
Prof.dr. W. Spooren
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Voting Advice Via Internet | 2012-09-01 | 2016-08-31 |
- Description
- The research project focuses on how text (form and content) and reader characteristics interact, and how (political) understanding is related to attitudes and intentions, situated in a research context with high societal impact
- Disciplines
- Linguistics
- Institutions
NWO-Begrijpelijke taal, Partners: UVA (Financier) Universiteit van Amsterdam (Collaboration) - Persons
B. Holleman (Project leader)
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Vogala | 2014 | - |
- Description
- The app Vogala, which is available for iPad, Android and online, makes medieval Dutch audible. Vogala brings to life several famous medieval Dutch texts, like Hebban olla vogala nestas hagunnan, Van den vos Reynaerde, scriptural passages, songs, and mystical visions of Hadewijch.
- Disciplines
- History
- Institutions
Universiteit Utrecht (Collaboration) - Persons
- -
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VK: Verrijkt Koninkrijk (Enriched Kingdom) | 2011 | 2013 |
- Description
- "Dr Loe de Jong's Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog remains the most appealing history of German occupied Dutch society (1940-1945). Published between 1969 and 1991, the 30 volumes still combine the qualities of an authoritative work for a general audience, and an inevitable point of reference for scholars. The aim of this project is twofold; in the demonstrator part of the project advanced tools and techniques are applied to gather data on De Jong's perception of the much debated issue of pillarization (Dutch:
'verzuiling') and group identity. In the resource curation part of the project the corpus will be enriched and made available to the CLARIN-community for further research. The overall budget for the project is € 119,993 and the partners are: NIOD Institute for War,
Holocaust and Genocide Studies (NIOD), University of Amsterdam (UvA), Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VUA), Meertens Institute and Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS-KNAW)."
- Disciplines
- -
- Institutions
NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies Universiteit van Amsterdam Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam - Persons
K. Ribbens
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Visual Analytics for the World's Library Data | 2015-04-01 | 2020-03-01 |
- Description
- OCLC Research, the Technical University of Eindhoven (Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science) and the University of Amsterdam (Faculty of Humanities) are conducting a 4-year project, entitled "CatVis: Visual Analytics for the World’s Library Data," from 1 September 2015 through 2019. The project is supported by a Creative Industry grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).
The CatVis project addresses the following questions:
How can librarians use data visualizations to manage, analyze, and present library collections?
How can visualizations of large bibliographic datasets and other complex data help researchers in the e-Humanities to ask and answer new research questions?
- Disciplines
- Archival studies
- Institutions
NWO Council for the Humanities (Financier) - Persons
Prof.dr. A. Betti (Researcher) Prof.dr. B. Speckmann (Project leader)
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Vincent van Gogh: The Letters | 2010 | - |
- Description
- The objective of this projec t was to publish Van Gogh’s letters as he wrote and intended them, and to place the correspondence as a whole in its historical context.
- Disciplines
- History
- Institutions
Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands (Collaboration) Van Gogh Museum (Collaboration) - Persons
- -
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Verbal Forms in Biblical Hebrew Poetry: Poetic Freedom or Linguistic System? | 2011-09-01 | 2015-08-01 |
- Description
- For centuries, Old Testament scholars have been analyzing the Biblical Hebrew texts by making use of literary analysis. This tradition of literary interpretation doesn't leave much room for a systematic linguistic analysis of Biblical Hebrew, and of Biblical Hebrew poetry in particular. Thus, poetic texts are considered to be artistic and beautiful, but individual pieces of art. This gap between Linguistics and poetry in the discipline of Old Testament studies is also visible in the literary approach's claim that in poetry the use of verbal forms isn't bound to any grammatical rules, but expresses the Biblical poet's rhetorical skills. This claim is the main source of the research problem that will be dealt with in this dissertation: the ignorance of scholars regarding the functions of verbal forms in Biblical Hebrew poetry.
As a solution to this problem we will propose a methodological shift from literary interpretation to linguistic analysis. Since the second half of the twentieth century Old Testament scholars have started to pay attention to the interaction between Theology and Linguistics which eventually resulted in the formation of a new approach called Text-Linguistics. Advocators of this approach stimulate the use of linguistic instruments in the analysis of Biblical Hebrew texts and assume this analysis should start with an investigation of the syntactic structures and relations that can be found within these texts. Because verbal forms fulfill important functions in the syntactic ordering of the texts, many text-linguistic publications concentrate on the analysis of the linguistic functions that can be assigned to these different verbal forms. Unfortunately, text-linguists until now have mainly been analyzing prosaic texts, while poetic texts and their use of verbal forms have hardly received any attention.
Therefore, based on these two shifts - the first one being methodological, the second being related to text-linguistics' object of study - a new methodological framework will be presented. Within this framework we will introduce the hypothesis that there is one single linguistic system which underlies the use of verbal forms in both Biblical Hebrew poetry and Biblical Hebrew prose. Taking the observation of many analogies between discursive prose's verbal system and poetry's use of verbal forms as a starting point in our research project, our hypothesis will be tested by critically analyzing text-linguistic publications about the functions of verbal forms in discursive prose and poetry and by performing our own linguistic analysis of the functioning of verbal forms in discursive prose and poetry. At the end of our research, we will investigate how our research may help the Bible translator and the Old Testament exegete - both often feeling very uncomfortable whith the practical situation of a free interpretation of verbal forms dependent on insight in context and on ones own intuition - to establish a more consistent interpretation of verbal froms in classical Hebrew poetry.
- Disciplines
- History
- Institutions
NWO Council for the Humanities (Financier) Section Biblical Studies (Secretariat) - Persons
Prof.dr. E. Talstra (Project leader)
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Varieties of Absorption in Narrative, and Aesthetic Experiences A Comparative Study of Responses to Literature and Film | 2010-09-01 | 2014-08-01 |
- Description
- Nell's Lost in a Book (1988) put absorbed reading of narrative fiction on the map of scholarly interests. Besides characterizing it as a trance-like state, Nell did leave absorption largely untheorized. Researchers within various disciplines from both the Humanities and the Social Sciences have stepped in and tried to describe absorption. Their separate endeavors have resulted in a terminology that is bewilderingly diverse. As a phenomenon absorption knows both proponents and opponents in the practical field of narrative creation and reception. Writers of political messages and advertisements have made good use of its persuasive effects. Societal concerns are raised about harmful impact of narratives created to confuse its audience as to what is real, lure them into adopting certain attitudes, or take particular ideological positions for granted (Appel 2008). In addition, concerns are expressed regarding a lack of the kinds of narratives that can make readers more critical and self-aware. Ronald Plasterk, the Dutch Minister of Culture, recently signalled the tendency of commercial media to offer only absorbing entertainment, and warned that media have the duty to dislodge audiences out of their comfort zone in order to open their mind to attend critically to what happens in the world. So far, however, claims about societal effects of narrative absorption, whether positive or negative, cannot be scientifically evaluated. In part this is due to the absence of empirical research on the mechanisms that underlie absorption (Bilandzic and Kinnebrock 2009). Although some progress has been made in measuring ?absorption-like states? and in identifying textual factors relevant in this context (Green 2004), little is known about what varieties of absorption there are, what features of narrative play a role in its production, how these features may interact with recipient traits, and how absorption relates to responses perhaps less comfortable than superficial fun, such as aesthetic and moral reflections. The research project proposed here will present a taxonomy of absorption-like experiential states. It will identify narrative features responsible for these states in 2 different media, film and literature. It will explore personality traits of viewers and readers that are relevant in bringing about absorption. And it will clarify relationships between narrative absorption and aesthetic experiences and their after effects. Accordingly our leading research question is: What is the role of absorption in aesthetic and other responses to literary and cinematic narratives? To answer this question, the current project innovatively unites empirical research with methodologies that are typical in the Humanities (i.e., text-analytic approaches to narrative; theoretical concerns about aesthetic responses; comparative media studies). Through collaboration with creative partners (e.g., authors, film directors), we intend to shape our materials in order to precisely match our research goals. The design of the project allows for a media-comparative approach with one PhD-project focusing on absorption in literature, and another on absorption in film. Furthermore, the entire research team is involved in a final experiment that targets a comparison between both media in their relations to absorption and to aesthetic experiences. Both PhD-projects consist of 4 experimental studies in which medium-specific narrative features that result in absorption related experiential states are identified. They will involve careful text-manipulation and take into account the contribution of reader/viewer characteristics (e.g., in terms of media literacy). To ultimately determine different experiential profiles, the Post-Doc project will conduct quantitative and qualitative empirical research to come to nuanced explicative characterizations of relationships between absorption profiles and aesthetic experiences, using the results of the two PhD- projects. The synthesis by the two applicants, relates the underlying mechanisms of narrative absorption to claims regarding positive or negative societal effects. Lastly, in the Post-Doc-articles as well as in the monograph, findings of all studies are considered in relation to games and virtual reality. The scholarly relevance of our research lies predominantly in providing the Humanities with an empirically founded understanding of narrative impact and the factors that influence it. Our studies are aimed at clarifying the relation between text factors, absorption, and aesthetic experience. These are all central concerns of scholars of literature, film, theatre, game studies (cf. Hakemulder 2008c). The project also offers essential contributions to the accumulating insights of social scientists concerning the role of absorption in narrative effects. Questions that require an answer prior to such (important) work are: what makes a narrative absorbing in the first place? How are particular forms of being absorbed related to feeling entertained, or enraptured, or inspired by its beauty? And finally, how do the answers to these questions inform the study of narrative effects? It seems plausible that these answers are fundamental to our understanding of narrative impact (e.g., on mood, escape, happiness, social interaction skills, critical thinking, openness to form and ideas, attitude and belief changes (Hakemulder 2000, Oatley 1999, 2002). We envision two major practical applications of our results. One is to solidify the knowledge base of media literacy training, which in this increasingly mediated culture is now more important than ever. The other is that creative storytellers (e.g., involved in storytelling in marketing and management) are provided with directives regarding ways in which textual features relate to particular types of (aesthetic) responses, including finding stories captivating. All of these are themes of interest to other absorbing media as well, most importantly perhaps games and other virtual reality media, as their user population is expanding so rapidly and pervasively. On a more general cultural note, a better understanding of the nature and origin of absorption and other related phenomena is crucial for deploying aesthetic antidotes to superficial entertainment.
- Disciplines
- Literary Studies
Media Studies
- Institutions
NWO Council for the Humanities (Financier) Institute for Cultural Inquiry (Secretariat) - Persons
Prof.dr. E.S.H. Tan (Researcher) Dr. F. Hakemulder (Project leader)
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