Thunnis van Oort is a media historian who specializes in the history of movie going. Before joining the Create-team, he coordinated and taught the Theatre and Media Studies track at University College Roosevelt. Previously he taught at Utrecht University, Vrije Universiteit and the Open University. In 2015, he visited Antwerp University as a Marie Curie Pegasus research fellow endowed by the Flanders Research Foundation (FWO). He wrote his PhD dissertation at Utrecht University on the emergence of cinema exhibition in the Catholic South, as part of the NOW project ‘ Cinema, Modern Life and Cultural Identity in the Netherlands, 1895-1940’. He is editor of the only media historical journal in the Dutch language area: Tijdschrift voor Mediageschiedenis / Journal for Media History.
Weixuan Li graduated from MIT in 2014 with dual masters and is pursuing her new passion in the art and art market in the Dutch Golden Age through her research masters study in Arts of the Netherlands at UvA. At CREATE, she develops GIS teaching manuals for BA and MA courses as a student assistant and will work on the knowledge transmission through spatial network as a Pre-Ph.D fellow in Digital Art History.
Chiara Piccoli is a postdoctoral researcher in the project “Virtual Interiors as Interfaces for Big Historical Data Research. Spatially enhanced publications of the creative industries of the Dutch Golden Age”. Within this project, she is responsible for the conceptualization and development of virtual reconstructions of a selection of 17th century houses. The aim of these 3D models is to act as data integration and hypothesis-testing platforms to spatially connect, manage and research the rich and heterogeneous data sources of everyday life in the Dutch Golden Age. Chiara completed her PhD research (Archaeopress 2018, available here in open access) at Leiden University, where she currently holds a part-time appointment as research / teaching staff member in the Digital Archaeology research group. Her research interests include urban studies, visual culture, the history of antiquarian and archaeological illustrations, and the exploitation of digital tools and 3D technologies for documentation, visualization, analysis and dissemination.
Bart Reuvekamp currently works as a junior researcher on the project ‘Virtual Interiors as Interfaces for Big Historical Data Research’. He is responsible for digging into a wide range of Archival Data of seventeenth century Amsterdam. Bart finished his master in urban history at the University of Amsterdam in 2018, with a thesis on the spatial distribution of wealth in early modern Amsterdam.
Hugo Huurdeman works as a postdoctoral researcher in the Virtual Interiors project. He will create and evaluate user interfaces for a Virtual Research Environment, integrating 3D reconstructions, 2D maps and contextual sources. Within the project, Hugo aims to research analytical augmentation and annotation in 3D user interfaces, as well as the value of game elements. As an embedded researcher, his work is closely intertwined with the partners of the Virtual Interiors project: the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and Brill. Hugo has a background in interactive media, human-computer interaction and information science. In the past decade, he has worked as a researcher, developer as well as digital artist. Creative expression, in a variety of manifestations, has always been an essential ingredient of his work.
Konstantin Todorov just graduated from his Masters of Artificial Intelligence at UvA and will be continuing his work on transfer learning over historical documents with Giovanni Colavizza, now applying this type of knowledge on Dutch historical documents. Originally he is from Bulgaria and has a strong background in Computer Science and Software Development with about 5 years of professional experience there.
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Former Researchers
Leonor Álvarez Francés
Did the Research Master in History at the University of Amsterdam, during which she specialized in the Dutch Golden Age and became acquainted with the Digital Humanities. Between February and October 2014 she worked as an embedded researcher for the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands within the project ‘Mapping Notes and Nodes in Networks. Exploring potential relationships in biographical data and cultural networks in the creative industry in Amsterdam and Rome in the Early Modern Period’. At the moment she works both for CREATE and as a PhD candidate for Leiden University within Raymond Fagel’s project ‘Facing the Enemy’.
Project: ONSTAGE: The Great Schouwburg Database (1638-1772)
Norbert Bakker
Currently Res. MA media studies student and previously completed MA Presentation & Preservation of the Moving Image. Interested in the influence of digital media platforms, digital tools and other technologies have on film culture, film heritage and film studies in general. I work one day a week as student-assistant for the CREATE project.
Thomas Delpeut
Thomas Delpeut (1988) graduated in History (Research Master) at the University of Amsterdam. During his studies he specialised in Dutch and European nineteenth-century music and concert history, publishing several articles on the topic. He wrote his thesis on Amsterdam’s nineteenth-century summer concerts and recently published an article in the BMGN-Low Countries Historical Review, evaluating the current state of the art and presenting new research perspectives for nineteenth-century music and concert history. Thomas is currently working on the project Musical Criticism and Cultural Capitals. Shaping, disseminating and appropriating nineteenth-century musical discourse in Dutch creative cities.
Wouter van Elburg
Currently MA Heritage and Memory Studies at the University of Amsterdam. I work one day a week as a student assistant for project COLEM on software for re-spelling seventeenth century Dutch texts. Studied Art History with a minor in architecture and urban planning and a specialisation in Amsterdam and city planning. Formerly involved in the CREATE project at the 4D Resarch Lab on housing in sixteenth century Amsterdam, for which I researched and reconstructed Warmoesstraat 138.
Project: COLEM: Creating an Orthographic Layer for Early Modern Texts
Dieuwke Hupkes
Has a bachelor’s degree in Physics and Astrophysics and a master’s degree in Logic. She works for CREATE 3 days a week, the other 2 days she works on neural models of parsing with Jelle Zuidema at the ILLC.
Project: Part-of-speech tagging of historical Dutch texts
Anna Foulidis
Currently MA public history student with a bachelor’s degree in history with a minor in art history and a minor in heritage and museum studies. I work for CREATE two days a week on the Design Derby Data project. On the other days I’m writing my thesis on the presentation of the Dutch Golden Age in historical museums. I’m interested in how changes in society affect cultural identity and the position of national history and heritage.
Project: Design Derby Data: Belgium and the Netherlands, 1815-2015
Rosa Merino Claros
Studied Philosophy, Linguistics and Mathematics. She wrote her Philosophy Master Thesis on Cantor´s Set Theory and its philosophical influences, while her Mathematics Thesis dealt with the Tensor-Train-Format and its algorithms, whose aim is to reduce the complexity of multidimensional functions. Afterwards she worked for two years as mobile applications developer. She is particularly interested in logic, computation and information retrieval related topics.
Project: Extraction and Exploration of Spatial Information in Documents
Mascha van Nieuwkerk
Studies at the Research Master in History. She was trained in history (BA, UvA) as well as music at the Conservatory of Amsterdam (BA, Quirine Viersen). As an award winning cellist (Princes Christina Competition, first price 2003; SJMN Competition, second price 2005) she is active in several succesfull chambermusic ensembles such as the Cello8ctet Amsterdam, Fuse and the Fourier piano trio. During her bachelor in History she specialized in nineteenth-century music culture. Her bachelor thesis about the music culture at the Felix Meritis Society resulted in publications in Skript (2012) and Ons Amsterdam (2013) and was selected for the VSNU Student Research Conference 2012. http://www.maschavannieuwkerk.com
Project: Felix Meritis Concert Programmes Database 1777-1888
Thijs de Raedt
Graduated in the fields of Cultural Sciences (BA) and History of Art (MA) at the University of Amsterdam, and currently completing his MA thesis in Museum Studies. He is particularly interested in mechanisms of collecting and exhibiting art of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Besides writing his thesis, Thijs now works two days per week on the CREATE Design Derby Data project.
Project: Design Derby Data: Belgium and the Netherlands, 1815-2015
Joanna Rozendaal
RMA Art Studies, track Dutch Golden Age Studies. Her research interests concern early modern book historical subjects in general and in particular the changing meaning and impact of images during the course of the seventeenth century.
Project: Material Evidence for Networks: the Case of Early Modern Printing
Tim Veldt MA
Is a master’s student in history at the UvA. He specializes in past visions of the future. For his master thesis he is currently researching the technological future visions during the interwar period (1919-1939). For his internship at CREATE, he studies the practical use of textmining tools for historical research and makes tutorials on how these tools can be used, for instance for analysis of newspapers, provided by the Dutch Royal Library (Delpher).
Project: Past visions of the future in digitized newspapers.
Ingeborg van Vugt
Graduated in Italian Linguistics and Culture at the University of Leiden in 2013. In 2014, I completed the master programme Book and Digital Media Studies in Leiden, which focuses on the history of the book and discusses the use of recent digital technologies. For my Master thesis I analyzed many correspondences concerning the history of Dutch-Tuscan relations during Grand Duke Cosimo’s III reign. During my studies and research I have become particularly interested in gaining insight in how digital humanities can effectively contribute to the analysis of correspondences and networks.
Tessa Wijckmans MA
Tessa Wijckmans (1989) graduated in Dutch literature (RMA). During her research master she specialized in computational stylistic research of early modern Dutch prose texts. She found that the unstable orthographies of the early modern texts cause problems for computational research of these texts. In her master thesis she explored the possibilities of automatic lemmatization of early modern Dutch prose in order to improve the quality of stylometric research of historic texts. Currently she’s focusing on automatic respelling of early modern texts to Modern spelled variants.
Project: COLEM: Creating an Orthographic Layer for Early Modern Texts
Project:ECARTICO: Linking cultural industries in the early modern Low Countries, ca. 1475 – ca. 1725
Hanna Jansen MA
MA worked as a research assistant and workshop coördinator in the CREATE program, while finishing her PhD dissertation on Soviet humanities scholars in the Cold War.
Jolanda Visser graduated from Vrije Universiteit in 2012, where she studied Comparative Arts and Media Studies. Her curiosity towards cinema history was piqued by the course The Art of Comparison: Cinematic City by of dr. I. L. Blom, in which insights were gained into theories, histories, and applications of intermediality, in particular regarding connections between cinema and architecture. After graduation, she specified the research towards the cinema The Movies in Amsterdam, which resulted in the book Samen naar de Movies – 100 jaar bioscoop op de Haarlemmerdijk. After completing her master degree, Jolanda was offered a position at the VU, where she has gained experience as a junior lecturer.
Lucas van der Deijl (1991) completed a double BA in History and Dutch and graduated in Dutch literature (RMA). He obtained a postgraduate certificate in Digital Humanities at University College London and developed Personagebank, a crowdsourced database for characters in Dutch novels. At CREATE, he will pursue his interest in quantitative methods and digital hermeneutics. He will evaluate different methods for topic modeling in order to trace the tracks of new philosophies (primarily Spinoza) in early modern Dutch texts.
Project: TOPIC: Tracing tracks of philosophical innovation in digital text corpora
Elise van Schaik is currently a research master’s student in Arts and Culture at UvA. She is specialized in the era of the Dutch Golden Age and has a specific interest in literature from this period. During her BA Dutch Language and Culture at UvA, she co-founded De Alphaman a medium that popularizes historical literature. At CREATE, she will pursue her interest in early modern Dutch text culture as a student assistant (TOPIC).
Anne-Rieke van Schaik (1995) is currently finishing her BA Art History (UvA), with a special interest in interdisciplinary Golden Age studies. At CREATE, she works one day a week as a student assistant on adding the records of the Antwerp guild of Saint Luke to the ECARTICO database.
Erik van Zummeren graduated in History (BA) at the University of Amsterdam in 2016. During my bachelor, I focussed on doing quantitative and computational history. For my bachelor thesis I worked on a quantitative analysis of the Dutch-Persian trade in the 18th century. In 2014 I was a student-assistant at the Coding the Humanities platform. Quite recently I did an internship as a ‘creative coder’ at the VPRO Backlight series. I am currently enrolled in the master programme Journalism and Media. For CREATE I will work one day in the week on CREATE TOPIC.
Vincent Baptist completed a BA in Applied Economics (KU Leuven), and a BA in Media Studies (UvA) with a minor in Journalism and Criticism. He currently pursues his film research interests as a Research Master student at the UvA. At CREATE, he works one day a week as a student assistant on History of Performing Arts.
Project 1: Mapping European Performing Arts Data (MEPAD)
Project 2: Dutch Overview Digital Humanities (DODH)
Renske Brouwer (1988) completed a BA in Scandinavian Studies and is currently finishing her master’s degree in Golden Age Studies. She is specialized in the connections between Scandinavia and the Dutch Republic in the Golden Age. At CREATE, she works as a student assistant on the Amsterdam City Theatre Database (ACT).
Lieke Beunders (1996) is currently finishing up her liberal arts degree at AUC, majoring in humanities with a special focus on literature and culture studies. She is writing her capstone on the 21st century affordances of the book in light of new media. In September, she plans to start a MA degree in Book Studies at the UvA. At CREATE, she works one day as a student assistant on the Amsterdam City Theatre Database (ACT).
Jan Vos completed a BA in Arts and Culture Studies and is currently finishing the master Dramaturgy. He works as a student assistant on the Amsterdam City Theatre Database (ACT).
Liselotte Salters completed a BA in Musicology at the University of Amsterdam in 2016. She’s currently a master’s student in Archival and Information Studies at the UvA, with special interest in the digitization of art records in the musicology field. She works one day a week for CREATE as student assistant in The Dutch Opera Context Project.
Kaspar Beelen currently works as Assistant Professor Digital Humanities at the University of Amsterdam. After completing his Ph.D. at the University of Antwerp (under the supervision of Marnix Beyen), he worked on the Digging into Linked Parliamentary Data Project at the University of Toronto and the University of Amsterdam. As researcher for CREATE he focusses on computational history, more specifically on the use of text-mining for political and cultural history. His main areas of interest include: gender and politics, the history of political representation and the evolution of affective discourse.
Mascha van Nieuwkerk studied violoncello at the Conservatory of Amsterdam (2016) and completed a MA in History at the University of Amsterdam (2016). She is currently working as a Pre-PhD fellow in Music History for The Dutch Opera Context Project. An award winning cellist, Mascha is a founding member of the ensemble Fuse, well know for their label-crossing arrangements and re-compositions of classical, jazz, and folk pieces for the Dutch Classical Music TV-show Podium Witteman.
Felix Meritis Concert Programmes Database 1777-1888
The Dutch Opera Context Project
Vincent Baptist followed a Research Master in Media Studies (specialization: Film Studies) at the University of Amsterdam. Before that, he obtained a BA in Applied Economics at KU Leuven and a BA in Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam. At CREATE, he previously worked as a student assistant on the project ‘Mapping European Performing Arts Data’, and now develops the project ‘Amsterdam Cinema Audiences’ as a Pre PhD fellow. He is currently also editorial assistant for NECSUS – European Journal of Media Studies.
Charlotte Vrielink studied Romance Languages and Cultures at Radboud University Nijmegen and partly at the Université Paris-Sorbonne, followed by a Research Master in Literary Studies at Radboud University, during which she did internships at the Werkgroep Achttiende Eeuw and at the Université Grenoble-Alpes. At CREATE, she is working as a Pre-PhD fellow in Theatre History, where she develops the pilot project “Tipping Point 1800. The repertoire of the Amsterdam City Theatre in transition from monopoly to free market”. This project makes use of digital tools and the ONSTAGE database to analyse the changing position of the Stadsschouwburg between 1774 and 1820, by studying changes in repertoire in relation to the organisational structure of the theatre, urban government and policy, and the broader local theatrical landscape.
Ewoud van Balgooi is a student of architectural history. He finished his BA at the University of Amsterdam and is continuing there with the Art History master. His main academic interest is the combination of visual digital techniques and the history of architecture.
Emillie V. de Keulenaar is a post-graduate with a MA in History of Political Thought and Intellectual History from University College London with previous education from Leiden University College. She is currently completing a rMA in New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam and is a member of the Open Intelligence Lab, a research group focusing on Alt-Right online vernacular culture. At CREATE, she is assisting Julia Noordegraaf in researching the impact of AI technologies in the humanities. Broadly, her interests lie in the intersections between computing technologies, epistemology and political thought, with particular focus on the role of online platforms in structuring the interaction between different political groups and ideas in the context of increasing political polarisation.