Research Themes

At CREATE we study the development of various cultural and creative industries through a series of projects affiliated with a distinct set of research themes. Working primarily with historical data deriving from cultural heritages collections, this type of data comes with its own research and development challenges. We aim to foster this research by providing the opportunity for cultural heritage institutions to collaborate with our team of varied specialists. These specializations include, but are not limited to, the three main pillars of the CREATE research themes. 

Our main research themes are Digital History (I), Performing Arts (II), and Cultural Analytics (III).


Research Objectives

The research program was created with the aim of stimulating digital humanities research from the theme of cultural heritage, which is one of the core foci of our faculty research policy. To this end, an application was made in 2013 for the Research Priority Area funding of the UvA Board, which focused on three core themes:

  1. Development of research into the history of creative cities (important research theme of the Faculty of Humanities with a link to the top sector Creative Industry as a source of research funding)
  2. Development and application of digital sources and methods for this type of historical research (stimulating digital humanities research and teaching)
  3. Focus on the history of Amsterdam (bundle and strengthen cooperation with external partners to increase the visibility and impact of FGW research)

The main goal of the CREATE program is to stimulate more programmatic research in the (digital) humanities. This is necessary because of the specialist knowledge that digital humanities research requires, but it also has a wider relevance: when researchers collaborate in clearly defined research programs, they can benefit from the pooling of each other’s expertise and networks, it becomes easier to set up long-term collaboration with external partners (from the field of research as the public and private sector) and our researchers will be better positioned when applying for research funding. It is also easier to make the research visible and to demonstrate its impact.

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