Since 2014, the KB has been inviting budding scientists to conduct research using tools and datasets from the online KB Lab. Researchers work on their own research for six months using data collections from large digitisation projects, e.g. from historical newspapers. Together with KB employees, they develop digital techniques that can provide answers to their research question.
Collaboration between researchers and the KB
The researcher-in-residence works on solutions for specific questions with the support of the KB’s programmers and content experts. In turn, the KB learns from their wishes and methods and can thereby improve our services. This is a mutually beneficial collaboration between the researchers and the KB.
Sharing results with other researchers
The results (tools and datasets) are made available on the KB Lab for other researchers, who can use and possibly expand on it. While working at the KB, the researchers-in-residence share their experiences via blogposts and a final presentation.
Annual call for proposals
Every year, researchers can submit a proposal to apply for the researcher-in-residence position. The call for proposals will be made available on the KB Lab website.
Apply for the Research-meets-Art-in-Residence (RAiR) 2025 now!
In celebration of the 10 year anniversary of the researcher-in-residence program, we are hosting a special edition aimed at researchers and artists. More information on the Research-meets-Arts-in-Residence (RAiR) program can be found here.
Previous and current researcher-in-residence projects
2024
Dr. Vicky Breemen (UU) & Dr. Kelly Breemen (UU)
Towards a Bias Impact Assessment Scale for digitised cultural heritage collections: Where could bias be located within digital cultural heritage collections and how can this bias be made visible?
Dr. Lucas van der Deijl (RUG)
Changing story models in early modern Dutch drama (1500-1700): How can we benefit from computational methods to formalise and describe changing story models in early modern Dutch theatre in a European context?
2023
Vera Provatorova MSc (UvA)
Towards robust entity linking and disambiguation on Dutch historical documents: To what extent is entity linking on Dutch-language archival data affected by entity overshadowing, and how can we make EL systems robust against it?
Dr Jesper Verhoef (EUR)
Mapping the Dutch Queer Web Sphere: What does the Dutch queer web sphere look like and how has it changed over time?
2022
Dr Ir Willemijn Elkhuizen (TUD)
Capturing and interacting with multi-sensory, temporal-spatial representations of children’s ‘novelty books’: How to capture/create digital, multi-sensory representations of cultural heritage artifacts? And how can technologies like AR and VR be exploited to interact with these digital representations?
Dr Karin de Wild (UL)
Museums on the Web: How to build a collection, that includes a selection of curated websites and derived dataset(s), that will allow investigating the history of museums on the Web?
2021
Dr Andreas van Cranenburgh (RUG)
A computational model of canonicity based on a diachronic digital corpus of canonical and non-canonical Dutch novels 1800-2000: How predictable is canonicity in texts?
Simon Kemper MA (UL)
Identifying Austronesian Entities in Dutch Texts: Translingual Named Entity processing of East Indies Newspapers from the 1930s and 1950s: Is it possible to improve entity recognition by linking historically related languages?
2020
Dr Giovanni Colavizza (UvA)
Is your OCR good enough? A comprehensive assessment of the impact of OCR quality on downstream tasks: How does the quality of optical character recognition affect further analyses?
Dr Seyran Khademi (TUD)
DepTH: Deep Training on History: How do we simultaneously examine modern and ancient images?
2019
Dr Kaspar Beelen (UvA)
“Why girls smile and boys don’t cry”: Exploring Stereotypes in Text and Image: How have gender stereotypes changed over the course of the last two centuries?
Dr Annemieke Romein (UGent)
Entangled Histories of Early Modern Ordinances: How do we improve the OCR quality of early modern legal texts and can we automatically add metadata to these texts?
2018
Antoine Peris MA (TUD)
EpIC: the Evolution of the Image of Cities as presented by Dutch local newspapers: How can we use computers to investigate how the image of cities in local and national newspapers has developed?
Dr Cynthia Liem (TUD)
Back in the Summer of 1869: multimodal and contextual enrichment of musical mentionings in newspapers: How can we trace references to pieces of music in Delpher's digitised newspapers and then connect them to the catalogue of the Muziekweb music library of the Central Discotheque Rotterdam?
2017
Thomas Smits MA (RU)
Illustrations to Photographs: using computer vision to analyse news pictures in Dutch newspapers, 1860-1940: How can we sort images from digitised Dutch newspapers by type of image?
Melvin Wevers MA (UU)
Combining Textual Content and Non-Textual Features of Digitized Newspaper Advertisements to Study Historical Developments in the Dutch Consumer Society: How can textual analysis be used to study the role of the United States as a reference culture in 20th-century Dutch newspaper debates about consumer goods?
2016
Dr Frank Harbers (RUG)
Discerning Journalistic Styles. Exploring Automated Analysis of Journalism’s Modes of Expression: How can we investigate the development of the journalistic form, in particular genre classification, through automated content analysis?
Puck Wildschut MPhil (RU)
Roles, relations and references: Towards a computation-based distant reading of narrative-semantic roles in large datasets in Dutch: How can you use computers to study literature and reading methods?
2015
Dr Martijn Kleppe (EUR) & Dr Desmond Elliot (CWI)
FoCon - Foto’s in en uit context: Can we develop techniques to study the reuse of photographs in different media and over time?
Dr Pim Huijnen (UU)
From Keyword search to Concept Mining
2014
Dr Samuël Kruizinga (UvA) & Dr Jiyin He (UvA)
Public memory of World War I in the Netherlands