We are happy to announce the Researchers-in-Residence for 2026: Sarah Shoilee and Luiza Teixeira-Costa.
Since 2014, the KB invites early-career researchers to spend six months at the KB to perform research using the digital collections of the KB and working in collaboration with experts at the KB. More information on the Researcher-in-Residence program can be found here.
Sarah Shoilee is a final-year PhD candidate at the VU Amsterdam with experience in Linked Open Data, knowledge mining, and data visualization. Her research focuses on semantic web technologies, knowledge engineering and human-centered AI. During her residency at the KB (starting Q1) she will work on the project Linking Collectors and Colonial History: Entity Linking between Delpher Newspapers (1800–1876) and Museum Datasets.
[ABSTRACT]
"This project will explore how Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Entity Linking can be used to connect historical newspaper data from the Delpher dataset (1800–1876) with museum objects’ collector records from the Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen (NMVW) and Museum Bronbeek. The aim is to trace object provenance through military biographies—by identifying mentions of Dutch East Indies army personnel and events in historical newspapers and linking these to collectors who contributed to colonial-era museum collections. While NER models for Dutch texts already exist, this project aims to contribute in developing and evaluating entity linking strategies and heuristics for connecting incomplete, ambiguous, and biased museum datasets with relevant newspaper articles. A key research challenge in this work is addressing edge cases—less-documented individuals who appear infrequently in either museum datasets or newspapers. The project will define such cases based on at least three different criteria: (1) few newspaper mentions, (2) few collected objects, or (3) limited available attributes—and design rules to improve disambiguation. The outcome will be two-fold: (1) a subset of Delpher newspaper articles referencing the Dutch East Indies army (1800–1876), and (2) a visual interface prototype connecting museum collectors with related newspaper mentions. Overall, this work will provide a reusable methodological framework for linking Linked Data resources with textual archives—laying a foundation for analyzing historical networks, movement patterns, and provenance relations within Dutch colonial contexts."
Dr. Luiza Teixeira-Costa is a researcher at the Meertens Instituut with a PhD in Botany, a minor specialization in Museology and Science Outreach, and five years of experience as postdoctoral researcher at different institutions. Her research focuses on plant-plant and plant-people interactions, using digital methods to extract and analyze the data. During her residency at the KB (starting Q3) she will work on the project Foreigners we love to hate? Exploring media discourse on invasive and introduced plant species through Dutch texts between 1800 and 2000.
[ABSTRACT]
"In times of increased human displacement and returning extreme nationalism, the field of invasion ecology has increased in notoriety and controversy. Built on a conception of nativeness that derives from 18-19th century legal framework, the terminology used to describe the so-called invasive species is often fraught with militaristic language and xenophobic connotations. The use of these terms in both academic and media discourses can influence the way in which people perceive and act towards these species, including whether they support environmental management plans. To offer a historical perspective on this topic, the present project proposes to investigate how invasive and non-native plants were portrayed in Dutch periodicals between 1800 and 2000. The project will also consider different social and biocultural contexts by including material published in Indonesia, Suriname and the former Netherlands Antilles. Data in the form of newspaper and magazine articles will be retrieved from the KB digital collections and explored through recently developed frameworks for text content analysis focused on the topic of invasive species. Digital methods such as the use of large language models will also be applied, especially for the automation of data coding."
The 2026 Researchers-in-Residence will describe their process through blogposts on KB Lab throughout the year. Any resulting output, such as tools and datasets will also be published there.