With great pleasure we introduce two new researchers-in-residence who have started their KB projects recently. They will be researching museum websites and new ways of interacting with pop-up books.
Museologist Karin de Wild (Leiden University) started the six-month project ‘Museums on the web’, an investigation in our web collection. As a researcher-in-residence, she hopes to make the web collection more visible, especially the museum websites. She will present us the hidden gems in the selection of museum websites, and will try and do quantitative analysis on it. She is also looking into the process of extracting data out of the web collection.
Willemijn Elkhuizen is assistant professor at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering (TUDelft). In her researcher-in-residence project she would like to explore which and how various sensory attributes like pop-up books can be captured (e.g. visual, auditory, and tactile attributes), and how they might be represented and interacted with, using augmented and virtual reality techniques. This project is also part of Future Libraries Lab, where technology and ideas about how the library of the future could look like, come together.
Both researchers will present their results later on in, among other things, blogs on the KB Lab. Furthermore, Karin will be the editor of a special issue of Internet Histories: Digital Technology, Culture and Society (Taylor and Francis), entitled ‘Museums on the Web’.
The researcher-in-residence programme
Since 2014, the KB invites early career and promising scholars to spend six months at the Research department of the KB using a call for proposals. Scientists will work on their own research using data from the KB. These can be from digital born collections or large digitisation projects, for instance with digitized historical newspapers. But they can also use tools or datasets found here on the KB lab (and often produced by previous researchers-in-residence). Together with KB employees, they try to answer their research question using computational techniques. The results, in most cases blogs, tools or datasets, are made available in the KB Lab to ensure other researchers can use the outcomes as well.
Previous projects
Previous researchers-in-residence used this program to developed, for example, the Genre Classifier to automatically recognise genre in newspaper articles. We have also experimented with computer vision to research visual patterns in newspaper advertisements with SIAMESE.
Review of proposals 2022
The researchers-in-residence are selected following a submitted proposal. Each proposal is reviewed by a commission of senior researchers. This year’s commission for the regular researcher-in-residence call consisted of the following members:
- prof. dr. Susan Aasman (RUG)
- prof. dr. Joris van Eijnatten (eScience Center/UU)
- dr. Anne Helmond (UvA)
- dr. Simon Kemper (UL)
- prof. dr. Jacco van Ossenbruggen (VU)
For 2022 we also invited early career researchers of the TU Delft to become a Future Libraries Lab researcher-in-residence through a separate call. That commission consisted of the following members:
- prof. dr. Alessandro Bozzon (TU Delft)
- dr. Irene Haslinger (University Library TU Delft)
- dr. Cynthia Liem (TU Delft)
- Rosemarie van der Veen-Oei (KB)