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| Digital Humanities Lab (Leiden) | |
|---|---|
| Name | Digital Humanities Lab (Leiden) |
| Established | 2010s |
| Type | Research centre |
| Affiliation | Leiden University |
| City | Leiden |
| Country | Netherlands |
Digital Humanities Lab (Leiden) The Digital Humanities Lab (Leiden) is a research and teaching centre based at Leiden University that integrates computational methods with humanities scholarship. It serves as a hub linking disciplines such as Classics, History, Philology, Archaeology, and Linguistics with technical domains represented by Computer Science, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, and Geographic Information Systems. The Lab supports projects grounded in collections from institutions including the National Library of the Netherlands, the Leiden University Library, the Rijksmuseum, and the Teylers Museum.
The Lab emerged in the 2010s from interdisciplinary initiatives involving Leiden University, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, and regional partners such as Huygens Institute and Naturalis Biodiversity Center. Early collaborations connected projects on Latin literature, Arabic manuscripts, Malay archives, and Chinese epigraphy while engaging scholars affiliated with University of Oxford, Harvard University, University of Cambridge, Stanford University, and KU Leuven. Funding and strategic alignment were influenced by programs administered by the European Research Council, the Dutch Research Council, and the European Commission.
The Lab's mission aligns with mandates from Leiden University and international agencies such as the UNESCO for cultural heritage preservation, and with standards championed by organizations like the Text Encoding Initiative and the International Council on Archives. Objectives include enabling reproducible research recognized by publishers such as Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Brill, and De Gruyter, fostering open science practices advocated by OpenAIRE, supporting digital curation with partners like the Digital Preservation Coalition, and training researchers to work with tools from GitHub, Python (programming language), R (programming language), and TensorFlow.
The Lab houses compute resources interoperable with infrastructures such as SURF, PRACE, and the European Grid Infrastructure, and provides access to imaging equipment comparable to facilities at the British Library, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and the Smithsonian Institution. Collections linked to the Lab include digitized manuscripts from the Leiden University Library, maps from the National Archives of the Netherlands, inscriptions cataloged by the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, and photographic archives from the Netherlands Institute for Art History. Software stacks and platforms in use include Zotero, Omeka, IIIF, Gephi, QGIS, and DARIAH services.
Project themes span computational philology exemplified by work on Homeric Hymns, network analysis applied to correspondence such as the Huygens Correspondence Network, geospatial studies of sites like Texel and Pompeii, and digital editions of texts including The Leiden Manuscripts and Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum. Collaborative grants have supported investigations into Old Javanese manuscripts, Arabic palaeography paralleling efforts at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, and machine-learning approaches to OCR for Fraktur and Blackletter scripts. Projects build on methodological advances from labs at Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Allen Institute for AI, and Stanford Digital Humanities groups.
The Lab offers modules integrated into programmes at Leiden University including courses within the Faculty of Humanities, summer schools modeled on Digital Humanities Summer Institute, and workshops in partnership with institutions like King's College London, Columbia University, and University of Toronto. Training covers topics such as TEI encoding taught alongside manuals from the Text Encoding Initiative, GIS instruction reflecting curricula from University College London, and computational text analysis using libraries developed by NumPy, NLTK, and spaCy. Student projects frequently interface with archives such as the International Institute of Social History and museums including the Rijksmuseum.
The Lab maintains formal partnerships with national and international bodies such as DANS, CLARIN, DARIAH-EU, and the European Research Council, and collaborates on fellowship schemes with the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, the Huygens Institute, and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Exchange networks include ties to University of Amsterdam, VU Amsterdam, Erasmus University Rotterdam, and overseas links to Yale University, Princeton University, and Peking University. Industry collaborations have involved technology firms such as Google, Microsoft Research, and IBM Research on projects related to digitization and machine learning.
Outputs include peer-reviewed articles in journals like Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Journal of Archaeological Science, Computers and the Humanities, and publications with presses such as Bloomsbury, Routledge, and Leiden University Press. The Lab releases open datasets registered with repositories like Zenodo, the Dataverse Project, and the Netherlands eScience Center, and contributes codebases hosted on GitHub and GitLab. Exhibitions and public-facing outputs have been staged with partners including the Rijksmuseum, the National Museum of Antiquities (Netherlands), and the Museum of the History of Science, while doctoral theses produced by students have been awarded through Leiden University doctoral committees and recognized by associations such as the European Association for Digital Humanities.
Category:Leiden University Category:Digital humanities institutions