Research Mike Kestemont

Abstract

Families today come in various shapes and forms, characterized by a wide range of cultural, economic, social, and psychological determinants, and show increasingly "diverging destinies". The inherently dynamic nature of what comprises a family and how it is understood on both individual and societal level, therefore gives way to a continuous process of "doing family". The practices of doing family are shaped by social norms, inspired by cultural products that imagine possible families and regulated by a legal framework, all of which are dynamic in their own right. The overall aim of the FAMFLEX consortium is to advance theoretical sociological, literary and legal insights into how increasingly flexible and complex family practices (the families we live "by") unfold across cohorts within sociological and legal structures and institutions (the families we live "in"). This requires an interdisciplinary and mixed-methods quantitative and qualitative approach using largescale datasets and advanced analytical techniques. We develop and apply state-of-the art social science methods, socio-legal and literary approaches, embedded in the legal consideration of the constraints on current day family complexity. The innovative integration of classic (longitudinal) methodology with digital humanities (textual big data analysis incl. large language models), coupled with three main theoretical frameworks of life-course, gender, and ethnic and religious diversity, will push forward our sociological, legal and literary insights in how "doing family" unfolds today.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Mortelmans Dimitri
• Co-promoter: Joosen Vanessa
• Co-promoter: Kestemont Mike
• Co-promoter: Swennen Frederik

Research team(s)

• Centre for Population, Family and Health

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

Fan fiction, a form of literature driven by fans who craft new stories within existing canons, enjoys immense popularity. It thrives within convergence culture which denotes the increasing trend of a particular work spreading out across multiple platforms, leading to an intermedial canon. Examples like Harry Potter showcase how a unified narrative spans books, videogames, movies, and even fan-generated content. Most fan fiction is published and talked about online on platforms such as Archive of Our Own which makes it a valuable resource for computational literary studies. However, two main aspects of fan fiction are often neglected. 1) Even though fan fiction originated in print fanzines, there have been no large-scale studies of pre-internet fan fiction. This project therefore presents the first large-scale comparison of analogue and digital fan fiction. 2) In order to grasp the effects of convergence culture on fan fiction, this study will examine how a complex intermedial canon affects fan fiction. These questions will be computationally approached with a focus on the characters, as these take centre stage in these transformative works. Throughout the project, an open feedback line with fans of fandoms will be maintained, actively involving them in interpreting results. Their insights enrich analyses, ensuring a comprehensive understanding of the dynamic relationship between fan fiction and convergence culture.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Kestemont Mike
• Fellow: Allaert Mona

Research team(s)

• Antwerp Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

Jan van Boendale (c. 1280-1351?) was a highly influential Middle Dutch author in the 14th century, combining a job as city clerk in Antwerp with writing didactic literary works. Despite being the first Dutch author on whom we have substantial biographical information, few studies have systematically (1) assessed the influence of his historical positionality on his author function or (2) considered his oeuvre as a whole. This is due to the complex issue of authorship in the texts of the so-called 'Antwerp School', which makes the delineation of Boendale's oeuvre a notorious 'cold case' in Dutch literary history. This project will first delineate Boendale's oeuvre using computational authorship verification methods. Next, it will use those works to assess how Boendale's positionality influenced his author function. It will approach his positionality from three distinct angles: Boendale as a clerk, as a city dweller, and as a man. These angles feed directly into my research questions: how his positionality regarding the three aspects influenced his literary writings. Each research question will have a distinct methodology (computational text reuse detection, topic modeling and word field analysis respectively), advancing the application of computational research methods in medieval literature studies. Key to this project is the awareness that the historical Jan van Boendale need not always have been congruent to his narrators, an aspect that has been overlooked in the past.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Kestemont Mike
• Co-promoter: Sleiderink Remco
• Fellow: Vandyck Caroline

Research team(s)

• Antwerp Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

The Franco-Flemish polyphony preserved in the recently discovered Leuven Chansonnier belongs to European heritage that stands artistically at the same level as the Flemish Primitives' paintings. However, the performance of the music contained in the fifteenth-century manuscript is jeopardized by the more than five centuries that separate medieval composers and today's musicians. From the initial results of the research conducted to bridge this gap, it appears important to transcend the case of the Leuven Chansonnier and to integrate it into its broader musical, literary, and historical context through multidisciplinary research. At the same time, the the research that this entails pushes the limits of traditional analysis. The response to this situation lies in data production through innovative technology and AI-driven processes. The methodology developed for this purpose is expected to prove applicable in other domains of the humanities. Starting from the case of the Leuven Chansonnier, "New Perspectives on Medieval and Renaissance Courtly Song" addresses a multifaceted set of questions. Specifically, it involves (1) multidisciplinary research into the broader societal and cultural context within which the Leuven Chansonnier and the extensive corpus of sources related to it were produced and circulated; (2) innovative research into the architecture and acoustics of the spaces in which the source corpus in general, and the Leuven Chansonnier in particular, were performed; and the transposition of the resulting data and insights into a contemporary performance context; (3) the integration of the achieved results and their dissemination both through academic and practice-oriented research and via international, national, regional, and local valorization platforms that aim to provide an authentic heritage experience to a wide audience.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Kestemont Mike

Research team(s)

• Antwerp Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

A major challenge in the study of medieval literature is the imperfect survival of material sources, i.e. the manuscripts which document these narratives. Many works are now lost and we risk underestimating the original diversity of this literature. In response to this, we have recently turned to methods from ecology: unseen species models, meant to gauge the number of undetected species in field surveys, can help us estimate the number of "forgotten" works from medieval literature. During this sabbatical, I will advance the current state of this research in two specific directions. This research will consider five interrelated corpora of vernacular chivalric fiction from the high Middle Ages in North-Western Europe. (1) lost translations: vernacular literatures, such as Middle Dutch, are often considered "derivative", because they heavily relied on translations from French. Unseen species models allow to estimate the number of lost translations, thus yielding novel insights into processes of latent cultural transfer. (2) survivorship bias: like "shy" species in ecology, some categories of works (e.g. chansons de geste) might been more likely to go undetected in the surviving sources. Using variants of unseen species models, we will gauge whether the survival of medieval literature has indeed been biased along the axes of subgenre or date of composition. In these subtasks, I will collaborate with authoritative domain experts in historic literature and cultural ecology at the local and (inter)national level.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Kestemont Mike

Research team(s)

• Antwerp Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

A major challenge in the study of medieval literature is the imperfect survival of material sources, i.e. the manuscripts which document these narratives. Many works are now lost and we risk underestimating the original diversity of this literature. In response to this, we have recently turned to methods from ecology: unseen species models, meant to gauge the number of undetected species in field surveys, can help us estimate the number of "forgotten" works from medieval literature. During this sabbatical, I will advance the current state of this research in two specific directions. This research will consider five interrelated corpora of vernacular chivalric fiction from the high Middle Ages in North-Western Europe. (1) lost translations: vernacular literatures, such as Middle Dutch, are often considered "derivative", because they heavily relied on translations from French. Unseen species models allow to estimate the number of lost translations, thus yielding novel insights into processes of latent cultural transfer. (2) survivorship bias: like "shy" species in ecology, some categories of works (e.g. chansons de geste) might been more likely to go undetected in the surviving sources. Using variants of unseen species models, we will gauge whether the survival of medieval literature has indeed been biased along the axes of subgenre or date of composition. In these subtasks, I will collaborate with authoritative domain experts in historic literature and cultural ecology at the local and (inter)national level.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Kestemont Mike

Research team(s)

• Antwerp Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

The mission of the Centre for Research and Development Monitoring (ECOOM) is to support the Science, Technology, Innovation and Economy (including Entrepreneurship) policy of the Flemish government (STIE). ECOOM pays special attention to the economic and social impact of the STIE policy, bundled in overarching themes such as the human capital on which Flanders can rely for the development and implementation of this policy, the industrial and technology policy that underpins Flemish prosperity and well-being, and the productivity and international competitiveness realized with the deployed STIE resources. ECOOM UAntwerpen is the coordinator of the work program for the Flemish Academic Bibliographic Database for the Social and Human Sciences (VABB-SHW), is responsible for the (data) deliveries to the Flemish government and the Authoritative Panel (GP), and carries out assignments and research activities on student entrepreneurship.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Engels Tim
• Co-promoter: Blust Ronny
• Co-promoter: Kestemont Mike
• Co-promoter: Van Passel Steven

Research team(s)

Project website

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

Millions of people listen to true crime podcasts on a daily basis, but what explains their popularity? This project investigates the fact/fiction dichotomy in English-language true crime podcasts and analyses the role of poetic devices in suspending disbelief among their audiences. While previous research has examined the use of such devices in crime fiction, less attention has been given to their use in true crime podcasts, despite the genre's soaring popularity and its unique aural delivery. The project will apply computational methods from distant listening to an extensive dataset of true crime podcasts to assess whether true crime fiction makes heavier use of fictionality-signalling devices than other non-fiction genres, despite its focus on factuality. A comparative approach will be adopted, contrasting true crime podcasts with crime fiction novels and other (e.g. journalistic) podcast genres. In doing so, the project aims to verify the hypothesis that the specific poetics of the true crime podcast are able to enhance a sense of drama and suspense in their narratives by using techniques commonly associated with fiction. This, in turn, can increase the listener's willingness to suspend disbelief and accept the story as true. This macroscopic view of the contemporary true crime podcast will be supplemented with insights from Thing Theory to assess the role of inanimate objects in the genre's poetics (such as murder weapons or police files).

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Kestemont Mike
• Co-promoter: Smits Thomas
• Fellow: Verreyen Loren

Research team(s)

• Antwerp Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

'Re-mediating the Early Book: Pasts and Futures' (REBPAF) is a European Commission-funded MSCA Doctoral Network that will support 13 PhD researchers undertaking projects on late medieval and early modern books. These PhD researchers will be spread across the following institutions: University of Galway (3 positions), University of Antwerp (2 positions), University of Alicante (2 positions), University of Zürich (2 positions), University of Vienna (2 positions), and University of Bristol (2 positions). All PhD researchers recruited to this network will join a vibrant and supportive international community of scholars; they will also benefit from bespoke, network-wide programming and will gain hands-on work experience in related cultural sectors as part of their training programme. REBPAF focuses on the ways in which 15th- and 16th-century book producers (scribes, printers, entrepreneurs) negotiated the dynamic relations between the manuscript book and the printed book and adapted to the evolving challenges of the market, and it demonstrates the continuing relevance of these cultural and economic negotiations to the modern world. To this end, REBPAF unites the interests of present-day organisations that re-mediate the early book – publishers, bookdealers, museums, and other stakeholders in the creative and heritage sectors – with those of academic scholarship. REBPAF has the double aim of: 1) engaging a new generation of medievalists and early modernists in an innovative and collaborative research programme that asks fundamental and interdisciplinary questions about the history of the book and the written word and its future in a digital environment; and 2) equipping the researchers recruited to this network with high-level transferable skills and competencies through internships and training workshops provided by a suite of nine non-academic partners that have a direct interest in and relevance to our research agenda. REBPAF's non-academic partners include Antiquariat Inlibris (Austria), Maggs Bros. Ltd. (UK), The National Print Museum (Ireland), Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (Austria), Vlaamse Erfgoedbibliotheken (Belgium), Stiftsbibliothek Klosterneuburg (Austria), Boydell & Brewer (UK), Quaternio Verlag Luzern (Switzerland), and Cúirt International Festival of Literature (Ireland). The PhD projects in Antwerp are 'Karel ende Elegast in manuscript and print' (project 3) and 'Is it Worth It? Modelling the Perceived Value of the Medieval Book Using Predictive Machine-learning Methods' (project 11)

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Sleiderink Remco
• Co-promoter: Kestemont Mike
• Fellow: Fox Marika
• Fellow: Voorneveld Nicky

Research team(s)

• Institute for the Study of Literature in the Low Countries (ISLN)

Project website

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

Recent international research increasingly focuses on the spread and survival of medieval literature. During the Middle Ages, the material transmission of texts depended entirely on the manual transcription of literature, granting texts a fluid character. This project will investigate which coping mechanisms helped to guarantee the sustainable exchange of information in textual cultures that are characterized by unstable transmission modes. An important aspect of the survival of literature that deserves further empirical research is the text form. To examine whether formal aspects can be labelled as 'constraints' that limit changes, the complete transmission of two short 13th-century Middle Dutch texts will be compared in a digitally supported way, namely: the Martijn trilogy of the Flemish poet Jacob van Maerlant, and Dietsche Catoen, a translation of the Latin Distichs of Cato. The results will be controlled with a control corpus, namely Maerlant's voluminous Scolastica (1271). Because the texts differ significantly in terms of formal characteristics, this project wants to examine whether and which formal aspects of a text (such as rhyme and text structure) can be considered as 'coping mechanisms' in the transmission. It can be expected, for instance, that the Martijn trilogy, which is built according to complex rhyme schemes, shows less variation in the transmission than Dietsche Catoen, in which the only formal requirements are the four-line stanzas and the paired rhyme.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Sleiderink Remco
• Co-promoter: Kestemont Mike
• Fellow: Moors Sofie

Research team(s)

• Institute for the Study of Literature in the Low Countries (ISLN)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

The landscape surrounding us contains countless toponyms or place-names, representing an enormous time depth. Extracting historical information from these impressive sources of information, however, has one major pitfall: not all of these toponyms have a 1-on-1 relationship with 'real' historical landscape features. A medieval cartographer could easily add 'Hic Sunt Dracones' ['Here be Dragons'] as a dummy toponym to label an unexplored area, and toponyms can shift in space or meaning. A concrete and satisfactory method to deal with these complications is still to be developed. Hic Sunt Dracones models the nexus toponym-meaning-landscape for a region well documented by sequences of historical maps, and subsequently uses machine learning to map landscape change of an area for which limited cartographic evidence, but only toponyms are available in order to: (1) understand the potential of toponyms to shed reliable light on a landscape, (2) construct toponym and landscape datasets via new methodologies for extracting text and landscape features from historical maps, (3) apply machine learning for a data-driven landscape reconstruction and (4) investigate the scalability of the methodology. Hic Sunt Dracones will lead to considerable advances in the fields of toponymy and landscape history by providing innovative answers and methodological solutions to the fundamental question when and under which circumstances toponyms change in meaning and space.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Jongepier Iason
• Co-promoter: Kestemont Mike
• Fellow: De Coster Christophe

Research team(s)

• Centre for Urban History

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

Most knowledge is stored in unstructured data like text, which must be structured before it can be mined. The need and opportunities for this automatic text analysis have considerably increased recently with developments in Artificial Intelligence, not only in the humanities and social sciences, but also in the exact and medical sciences. The mission of the ATMC is to provide scalable solutions to researchers from any scientific discipline that wants to analyze and use large amounts of textual data. Text data should be seen here in a broad sense including automatically transcribed speech, written text in images, and images automatically described in text. ATMC bundles the unique existing expertise in digital text analysis at the University of Antwerp with special emphasis on explainable AI and will provide the capacity to support the growing number of interdisciplinary queries that reach us today.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Daelemans Walter
• Co-promoter: Kestemont Mike
• Co-promoter: Martens David
• Co-promoter: Oramas Mogrovejo José Antonio

Research team(s)

• Centre for Computational Linguistics, Psycholinguistics and Sociolinguistics (CLiPS)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

CLARIAH-VL constitutes the Flemish contribution to the European DARIAH (Digital Humanities) and CLARIN (Computational Linguistics) research infrastructures (ERICs). Building on the work of these landmark ERICs, CLARIAH-VL will join the efforts of their respective Flemish consortia towards further development and valorisation of high-quality, modular, user-friendly tools, resources, and services by and for humanities researchers. The infrastructure brings together 22 research teams representing a range of disciplines from the universities of Ghent, Antwerp, Leuven and Brussels and the Dutch Language Institute. CLARIAH-VL will continue catering to the highly diverse and multilingual composition of digital humanities data inherent in European long term history, culture, environment and society. To facilitate and (semi-)automate as many aspects of the workflows of humanities researchers as possible, each service component of the infrastructure will need to take full advantage of the most recent advances in the fields of machine learning, linked data and semantic technologies especially with regard to digital text and image analysis.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Daelemans Walter
• Co-promoter: Kestemont Mike
• Co-promoter: Soens Tim
• Co-promoter: Van Hulle Dirk

Research team(s)

• Antwerp Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

Ideological bias concerning age, gender, ethnicity and social class is a major ethical concern in contemporary society, influencing human behaviour both at macro- and micro-levels. Recent studies have demonstrated that machine learning methods (from artificial intelligence) not only capture, but amplify the ideological biases in the data they are trained on. In this project, we aim to strategically turn this undesirable property to our advantage and exploit the study of ideological biases for visual cultures in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (c.1800-c.1940). Recent cognitive studies make clear how ideological biases largely result from processes of social learning. To study the construction and dissemination of ideological bias we put forth three case studies in crucial areas of social control: education (children's literature), mass communication (magic lantern slides and performances), and regulation (police reports). These interlinked areas of study come with a wealth of rights-free digitized material and pre-existing scholarship. Through the application of standard routines from machine learning, we aim to elicit implicit patterns and trends relating to ideological bias and confront these with received knowledge. The current project is innovative in its methodology through its study of pixel data through computer vision in the humanities which has received too little attention so far. Moreover, it uses data-driven technology to present a novel intersectional viewpoint on the construction of ideological bias in the past. Finally, by being embedded in recent cognitive studies, the project will be able to make claims on how implicit bias functioned in the past, understanding better what people thought and how such thinking structured behavioural interactions with their surrounding world.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Nanay Bence
• Co-promoter: Joosen Vanessa
• Co-promoter: Kestemont Mike
• Co-promoter: Van Damme Ilja
• Co-promoter: Vanhoutte Kurt

Research team(s)

• Centre for Philosophical Psychology

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

Understanding the literary preferences of the past, and explaining historical shifts therein, is one of the core tasks of cultural studies and a prerequisite for producing valid literary histories. This activity is moreover closely related to the formation of canons (i.e. the "hitlist" of the most influential literary works in a given culture). This project is concerned with the medieval period (ca. 600-1450), in which the hand-copied codex was the primary vehicle of texts. In this project I will draw methodological inspiration from the emerging paradigm of cultural evolution, where agent-based models are developed that allow us to study the processes of selection that drive cultural change (such as canon formation). Additionally, the persistence of cultural information over long stretches of time is a key research topic of this project. In a new framework that we call Cultural Ecology, we import empirical methods from ecology and biostatistics to provide innovative quantitative models of cultural change and survival, in particular in the domain of literature.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Kestemont Mike
• Fellow: Kestemont Mike

Research team(s)

• Antwerp Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

Support for the digitization of the Bibliography of the History of Belgium 1. Existing digital data can be exported from the State Archives database into a structured file format: until now this output at the close of each volume is manually converted to a formatted format that is delivered to the publisher/printer for the purpose of typesetting the printed copy. This mechanical task should be automated using a conversion script. 2. Recently, older, printed volumes of the BGB-BHB have been digitized and converted to a structured bibliographic format (XML). These digital files must be (a) computationally parsed into a format that can be injected into the database (at the National Archives), to supplement the already existing data with bibliographic descriptions that until now have only been consultable in printed form. In doing so (b) the creation of possible duplicates must be avoided to the greatest extent possible, using duplicate detection techniques from computational linguistics.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Kestemont Mike

Research team(s)

• Antwerp Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

In an era of fast-changing trends, people struggle to create a wardrobe that fits their lifestyle and needs. With a lot of choices, it takes time and effort to find out what clothes to wear and, consequently, what clothes to buy or throw away. Professional stylists can offer support in tackling this challenge, but their services are not affordable for most customers. In addition, many existing mobile applications, which are affordable, rely on human efforts to construct such a wardrobe. Recommendation systems can perfectly fill this market niche; however, such systems usually are not able to explain their recommendations. Users want to know why the provided recommendation is given. Hence, explainable recommendations are highly demanded by users, because explainability improves the transparency, persuasiveness, effectiveness, trustworthiness, and satisfaction of recommendations for users. In this project, we aim to develop a context-aware, multi-lingual, and multi-modal recommendation system for fashion compatibility of clothes enhanced with explanation functionality. This recommendation system will be the core of a mobile application complemented by a live chat interaction with customers via a built-in chatbot, which will provide daily fashion advice based on the customers' current wardrobe, weather, and schedule. In the follow-up project, we aim to develop the proposed mobile application to deliver the technology to the b2c market. Next on, we will launch a spin-off company to constantly improve our recommendation system and implement new features in our application.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Daelemans Walter
• Co-promoter: Kestemont Mike

Research team(s)

• Centre for Computational Linguistics, Psycholinguistics and Sociolinguistics (CLiPS)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

The proposed project aims to use language studies to better understand medieval translations of philosophical treatises. It therefore wants to investigate whether the combination of a philological study ('close reading') and computational data ('distant reading') can succeed in objectively ascribing certain currently anonymous translations to known medieval translators, or at least in grouping them as the works of one unnamed scholar. If this methodology results in the identification of translators or the grouping of translations, it helps to understand the intellectual environment in which the translations originated, to describe stability and change in the technical vocabulary of science and philosophy as an essential part of the European conceptual history, and to study the geographical and chronological transfer of these texts and concepts.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Kestemont Mike

Research team(s)

• Antwerp Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

The Carthusian monastery of Herne has had a profound impact on the cultural history of the Low Countries, as a true hotspot in the production, negotiation and dissemination of vernacular literature for lay audiences, in a time where most written texts were still in Latin. In a short time span (ca. 1350-1400), the members of the community collectively copied a fantastic collection of 25+ Middle Dutch and Latin manuscripts, many of which contain unique texts. The Herne monks, who took a monastic oath of silence, were unusually productive and modest scribes, as suggested by the remarkable lack of self-attributions in their material. It is somewhat anachronistic therefore that recent literary scholarship has almost exclusively focused on an elusive search for the identification of specific individuals in the monastery (such as the famous Bible translator of 1360). In this project, we propose to study the charterhouse as a tight textual community, driven by a shared goal. To this end, we will focus on the scribal practice in the monastery, as a privileged gateway into the collaborations between the monks. Using stylochronometry we will study the evolution of the copying practice of the individual scribes and convergences therein. Because a significant share of these manuscripts are still inaccessible to the scholarly community, we will apply handwritten text recognition to produce diplomatic transcriptions that scholars can search, analyze and edit further.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Kestemont Mike

Research team(s)

• Antwerp Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

How can we unlock the Wisdom of the Past to answer spatial challenges today? The Digital Revolution is producing massive amounts of digital and digitized historical and archaeological data, which can be located with different degrees of precision in the landscape. Once integrated in a Geographical Information System (GIS), these data can be turned into a digital 'Time Machine'. In this project, funded by the Province of Antwerp, and framed in the scientific collaboration between the Province and the University of Antwerp, we test the potential of Time Machine technologies on the Herentals-Kleine Nete region, more specifically adressing the question of the historical land-use and water management of the river wetlands along the river Kleine Nete. If successfull, the project will result in A) an integrated methodology for the use of digital and digitized data in landscape history and archaeolgy; B) new insights in the history and evolution of valuable river wetlands and C) suggestions for the valorization of this knowledge in ecosystem management, tourism, agriculture and landscape development.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Soens Tim
• Co-promoter: Kestemont Mike
• Co-promoter: Van Damme Ilja
• Co-promoter: Verlinden Jouke Casper

Research team(s)

• Centre for Urban History

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

Europe urgently needs to restore and intensify its engagement with its past. Time Machine will give Europe the technology to strengthen its identity against globalisation, populism and increased social exclusion, by turning its history and cultural heritage into a living resource for co-creating its future. The Large Scale Research Initiative (LSRI) will develop a large-scale digitisation and computing infrastructure mapping millennia of European historical and geographical evolution, transforming kilometres of archives, large collections from museums and libraries, and geohistorical datasets into a distributed digital information system. To succeed, a series of fundamental breakthroughs are targeted in Artificial Intelligence and ICT, making Europe the leader in the extraction and analysis of Big Data of the Past. Time Machine will drive Social Sciences and Humanities toward larger problems, allowing new interpretative models to be built on a superior scale. It will bring a new era of open access to sources, where past and on-going research are open science. This constant flux of knowledge will have a profound effect on education, encouraging reflection on long trends and sharpening critical thinking, and will act as an economic motor for new professions, services and products, impacting key sectors of European economy, including ICT, creative industries and tourism, the development of Smart Cities and land use. The CSA will develop a full LSRI proposal around the Time Machine vision. Detailed roadmaps will be prepared, organised around science and technology, operational principles and infrastructure, exploitation avenues and framework conditions. A dissemination programme aims to further strengthen the rapidly growing ecosystem, currently counting 95 research institutions, most prestigious European cultural heritage associations, large enterprises and innovative SMEs, influential business and civil society associations, and international and national institutional bodies.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Van Damme Ilja
• Co-promoter: Daelemans Walter
• Co-promoter: Kestemont Mike
• Co-promoter: Soens Tim
• Co-promoter: Vanhoutte Kurt
• Co-promoter: Van Hulle Dirk

Research team(s)

• Centre for Urban History

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

CLARIAH-VL: Open Humanities Service Infrastructure is the Flemish contribution to the European DARIAH and CLARIN infrastructures. It brings together and extends the portfolio of services enabling digital scholarship in the Arts and Humanities offered by the DARIAH-VL Virtual Research Environment Service Infrastructure (VRE-SI; Hercules & FWO 2015-2018) with the digital tools and language data that are offered through CLARIN-DLU/Flanders. The consortium which includes the network of Digital Humanities Research Centres at the universities of Antwerp, Brussels, Ghent and Leuven has been extended with the Dutch Language Institute (INT) – the CLARIN-ERIC certified B-Centre for Flanders. CLARIAH-VL will implement a modular research infrastructure embedding high-quality, user-friendly tools and resources into the workflows of humanities researchers in the five focus areas of linguistics; literature; socio-economic history; media studies; ancient history and archaeology. CLARIAH-VL aims to provide sustainable services, while fostering experimental development and innovation. Offering an open infrastructure which facilitates public humanities is a guiding principle for CLARIAH-VL. It will ensure the accessibility and relevance of the humanities to the general public, specific (heritage) community groups and policy makers. It will make it technically possible to share knowledge, including sharing and co-creating knowledge with non-specialist users, such as facilitating citizen science and crowdsourcing projects. Furthermore, by implementing international best practices in FAIR (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability) Research Data Management (RDM), CLARIAH-VL will pave the way to Flemish participation in the European Open Science Cloud.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Van Hulle Dirk
• Co-promoter: Daelemans Walter
• Co-promoter: Kestemont Mike
• Co-promoter: Soens Tim

Research team(s)

• Antwerp Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

CATCH 2020 aims to provide a working infrastructure for the computer-assisted transcription of complex handwritten documents. It will do so by building on the existing Transkribus platform for Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) – which allows us to process handwritten textual documents in a way that is similar to how OCR processes printed textual documents.. Rather than producing flat transcripts of digital facsimile images, however, CATCH 2020 will produce structured texts, providing tools to add textual and linguistic dimensions to the transcription by combining the state of the art of the research field of textual scholarship with the state of the art of the research field of computational linguistics.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Van Hulle Dirk
• Co-promoter: Absillis Kevin
• Co-promoter: Daelemans Walter
• Co-promoter: Kestemont Mike
• Co-promoter: Petré Peter
• Co-promoter: Soens Tim

Research team(s)

• Antwerp Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC)

Project website

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

This TEAM project funded by VLIR-UOS is a collaboration between the University of Antwerp and the University of the Philippines that combines an exchange of DH expertise and training with a specific digitization project of rare Philippine newspapers and magazines. The Universtity of Antwerp's project three promotors are Mike Kestemont, Dirk Van Hulle, and Rocío Ortuño. The project aims to improve the competitiveness of Philippine Humanities research in a globalized world, including the possibilities of student and professional mobility offered by the ASEAN confluence, by training faculty members and students in the field of Digital Humanities. The first and crucial step towards this objective (1) is the digitization of materials and the creation of a freely accessible environment with user friendly search facilities. Several periodicals published before World War II are in a precarious state of preservation and, located in Metro Manila, they are not accessible to all universities in the Philippines. By digitizing these periodicals and hosting them in a freely accessible online repository, they could be made available to all peripheral universities, and used in DH related research. Subsequently, (2) training in DH will be provided at different campuses of the University of the Philippines System. This training fits in the Philippine government's priority for promoting digital literacy both among scholars and the larger public. It also allows the University of the Philippines to participate in the global emergence and collaborative hallmark of DH.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Kestemont Mike
• Co-promoter: Ortuño Casanova María del Rocío
• Co-promoter: Van Hulle Dirk

Research team(s)

• Antwerp Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

AI Stories is a language technological project based around the paediatrics wards of two Flemish hospitals. The project intends to push forward state of the art natural language generation, in order to implement a system capable of autonomously telling stories, and revealing invaluable psychological data to healthcare staff. In turn, the same technology could be used by companies and sectors outside of healthcare. Such advances will facilitate educational and caring Artificial Intelligence software, and allow companies in those sectors to build and analyse usable systems. The paediatrics ward is an acute example of a socially challenging linguistic context for children, that also exists more generally. By researching there, and developing an intelligent system capable of prolonged dialogue, which incorporates the feedback of healthcare staff, a robust solution across care industries is achievable.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Kestemont Mike
• Co-promoter: De Smedt Tom
• Fellow: Burtenshaw Benjamin

Research team(s)

• Antwerp Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

Approximately 1 of out of 1,000 neonates is diagnosed with a bilateral severe-to-profound hearing loss. Hearing aids, such as cochlear implants (CI), have opened up unprecedented perspectives for these children. Although CIs generally lead to remarkable gains in the spoken language proficiency of hearing-impaired children, their speech remains deviant from normal hearing children's speech, even after several years of device use. Adult speakers are able to discriminate between the speech of CI-children and that of normally hearing children. In other words, CI children's speech remains identifiable as the speech of a hearing impaired individual. Surprisingly, the exact characteristics on which adults base such decisions have so far remained elusive, which makes it difficult for clinicians to finetune speech rehabilitation programs. In this project, we aim to exploit recent advances in "Deep" Representation Learning to close in on these characteristics. Recent connectionist models (neural networks) have shown a promising performance in modelling raw audio signals, such as recorded speech. Through the careful inspection, visualization and interpretation of such models, we aim to uncover which specific features in the speech of cochlear-implanted children are responsible for the identifiability of their speech production.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Kestemont Mike
• Co-promoter: Gillis Steven
• Fellow: Nurzia Pietro

Research team(s)

• Antwerp Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

What if you could travel through time as easily as we travel through space? With the Time Machine consortium, we work towards a large-scale FET Flagship project to build a large-scale simulator capable to map more than 2000 years of European history. This big data of the past, a common resource for the future, will trigger pioneering and momentous cultural, economic and social shifts. Understanding the past undoubtedly is a prerequisite for understanding present-day societal challenges and contributes to more inclusive, innovative and reflective societies. Researchers from all over the world are spearheading joint forces within the Time Machine FET Flagship project to reinvigorate the past through one of the most ambitious projects ever on European culture and identity. The fundamental idea of this project is based on Europe's truly unique asset: its long history, its multilingualism and interculturalism.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Kestemont Mike
• Co-promoter: Daelemans Walter
• Co-promoter: Soens Tim
• Co-promoter: Van Damme Ilja
• Co-promoter: Van Hulle Dirk

Research team(s)

• Antwerp Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

What does it mean when the rhythm of a literary text is called 'snappy' or 'fluid'? And what are the characteristics of literature that is 'easily engraved on one's mind'? The rhythmical qualities of literature are often described on an intuitive basis, while using vague terms. This is especially true for Middle Dutch literature. The many rhymed texts of our literary history's earliest stages frequently receive labels like these. However, it is often unclear what is actually meant by them. With this research, it is my ambition to provide the highly necessary scientific backing to these intuitive – and therefore potentially biased – statements. Contrary to previous research, I will make use of computational techniques to investigate the rhythmical qualities of Middle Dutch literature. Because these techniques are unprejudiced, subjectivity can be ruled out. As a result, we will achieve a precise and understandable notion of the rhythmicities of literary texts. For the first time ever, we will be able to pinpoint precisely the reasons for certain intuitive observations. Also, by not restricting ourselves to the analysis of individual texts, we will compare the rhythms present in different genres of literature. Without losing ourselves in a jungle of vague impressions, we will therefore be able to put our finger on, for example, the rhythmical differences between the famous texts 'Van den vos Reynaerde' and 'Karel ende Elegast'.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Kestemont Mike
• Co-promoter: Willaert Frank
• Fellow: Haverals Wouter

Research team(s)

• Antwerp Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC)

Project website

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

The aim of AI Poems is to develop a software and surrounding service to give hospitalised children access to creative language, and utilise this knowledge to offer a concise and multilingual program to pediatric wards in Flanders and abroad. Using the latest Natural Language Processing technology, the software will produce poetic and visually appealing text, controlled by a child's input. The research project will test multiple forms of physical input, so that children with disabilities can use the program, but also to make the project creatively and socially appealing to a child. The project is partnered with University Hospital Antwerp (UZA) and University Hospital Leuven (UZLeuven), where research will be conducted in pediatric wards. The project will be avised and supported by; partners in Belgium, The Ghent Health Psychology Lab (GHP), Experimental Psychology at The Free University of Brussels (EXTO), The Computational Linguistics & Psycholinguistics Research Center at The University of Antwerp (CLiPS); and international partners, Natural Interaction at The University of Madrid, The Creative Language System Group at The University of Dublin, and Apple Computer.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Kestemont Mike
• Fellow: Burtenshaw Benjamin

Research team(s)

• Antwerp Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

The INSIGHT project aims to advance the application of automated algorithms from the field of Artificial Intelligence to support cultural heritage institutions in their effort to keep up with their ongoing annotation initiatives for their expanding digital collections. We will focus on recent advances in Machine Learning, where the application of neural networks (Deep Learning) has recently led to significant breakthroughs, for instance, in the fields of Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision. We will determine how state-of-the-art algorithms can be used to (semi-)automatically catalogue and describe digital objects, especially those for which no, little or incomplete metadata is available. The project focuses on making the digital collections of two federal museum clusters in Brussels ready to be exported to Europeana, i.e. the Royal Museums of Fine  Arts of Belgium and Royal Museums of Art and History.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Kestemont Mike
• Co-promoter: Daelemans Walter
• Co-promoter: Van Hulle Dirk

Research team(s)

• Antwerp Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC)
• Institute for the Study of Literature in the Low Countries (ISLN)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

In authorship studies, scholars use quantitative techniques from stylometry to attribute anonymous texts to known authors on the basis of writing style. Intertextuality – the phenomenon where authors integrate and/or allude to other texts in their own work – poses an interesting issue here: should all 'intertext', such as citations or allusions, be removed from a text before we can reliably analyze its style? This project challenges the traditional view in stylometry that such 'Fremdkörper' are pure noise and seeks to verify the hypothesis that intertext constitutes a crucial aspect of an author's individual writing style. To this end, we analyze a representative corpus of 12th century Latin literature, circling around the impressive oeuvre of Bernard of Clairvaux, in which (biblical and other) intertextuality plays a dominant role. This project will employ recent advances in 'deep' representation learning which allows to model texts from the character-level upwards.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Kestemont Mike
• Fellow: Manjavacas Enrique

Research team(s)

• Antwerp Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC)
• Institute for the Study of Literature in the Low Countries (ISLN)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

In a time of rapid urbanization solid long-term perspectives on the many environmental, social, economic or political challenges of urbanity are urgently needed. Uniting urban history, sociology, environmental studies and digital humanities, GIStorical Antwerp II turns the historical city into a digital lab which provides an answer to this need. For 8 snapshots between 1584 and 1984 it offers dynamic social maps including every household in the entire city of Antwerp. Construction combines innovative ways of crowd-sourcing and time-efficient spatial and text-mining methodologies (Linear Referencing, Named Entity Recognition). The result is a GIS-environment which not only allows a micro-level view of 500 years of urban development, but more importantly allows an immediate spatial and social contextualization of a sheer unlimited number of other datasets, both those realized through 30 years of research on Antwerp and the mass of structured and unstructured digital 'big data'. For both the applicants and the international research community a completely new type of longitudinal research on urban inequalities – from income over housing quality to pollution – becomes feasible.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Soens Tim
• Co-promoter: Blondé Bruno
• Co-promoter: De Block Greet
• Co-promoter: Greefs Hilde
• Co-promoter: Kestemont Mike
• Co-promoter: Loots Ilse
• Co-promoter: Oosterlynck Stijn
• Co-promoter: Stabel Peter
• Co-promoter: Van Damme Ilja

Research team(s)

• Centre for Urban History

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

In the Humanities, scholars study the products of the human mind, such as language, paintings, music, etc. Texts too are an important research object across many field in the Humanities. Until recently, most textual analyses in the Humanities were carried out manually by individual experts, via "close reading" or the careful, sustained reading of small sets of works. With the advent of personal computing in recent decades, an increasing number of texts are becoming available in digitized, electronic forms. This allows scholars to analyze much larger text collections via computer programs. "Distant Reading" is nowadays often used to denote such "macro"-forms of digital text analysis in the Humanities. Mining insights from large text collections via Distant Reading proves to be challenging. Therefore, it does not come as a surprise that, as the size of the datasets increases, we see that research methods often become less sophisticated. In many "Big Data" studies, we see for instance that scholars do little more than computing word frequencies across texts. If we want computers to become smarter and be able to read texts like humans can (cf. Artificial Intelligence), we therefore need to develop more complex forms of "Artificial Reading". Interestingly, we see that humans always have highly personal interpretations of texts, because they are influenced by their specific background. Many computer programs read texts in a more generic way and forget about the individual background that human readers have. Universities, as well as many large tech-companies in the world, such as Facebook or Google, are therefore currently developing smarter computer algorithms, which can automatically learn from stimuli in the outside world, just as humans would. These computer programs are called "Deep Learning" in computer science and have proven to be extremely successful in many real-world applications (e.g. face detection in pictures on social media). Surprisingly, these techniques have been rarely applied in Humanities research. The broad aim of this project is to transfer these promising "Deep Learning" methods to digital text analysis.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Kestemont Mike
• Fellow: Kestemont Mike

Research team(s)

• Antwerp Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC)
• Institute for the Study of Literature in the Low Countries (ISLN)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

What does it mean when the rhythm of a literary text is called 'snappy' or 'fluid'? And what are the characteristics of literature that is 'easily engraved on one's mind'? The rhythmical qualities of literature are often described on an intuitive basis, while using vague terms. This is especially true for Middle Dutch literature. The many rhymed texts of our literary history's earliest stages frequently receive labels like these. However, it is often unclear what is actually meant by them. With this research, it is my ambition to provide the highly necessary scientific backing to these intuitive – and therefore potentially biased – statements. Contrary to previous research, I will make use of computational techniques to investigate the rhythmical qualities of Middle Dutch literature. Because these techniques are unprejudiced, subjectivity can be ruled out. As a result, we will achieve a precise and understandable notion of the rhythmicities of literary texts. For the first time ever, we will be able to pinpoint precisely the reasons for certain intuitive observations. Also, by not restricting ourselves to the analysis of individual texts, we will compare the rhythms present in different genres of literature. Without losing ourselves in a jungle of vague impressions, we will therefore be able to put our finger on, for example, the rhythmical differences between the famous texts 'Van den vos Reynaerde' and 'Karel ende Elegast'.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Willaert Frank
• Co-promoter: Kestemont Mike
• Fellow: Haverals Wouter

Research team(s)

• Institute for the Study of Literature in the Low Countries (ISLN)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

In literary history, scholars commonly divide the temporal series of events which they are discussing into periods (e.g. Romanticism). This process is called periodization and it is considered an important task of historical literary scholarship. In spite of its present-day relevance, periodization remains a surprisingly controversial process: some of the most influential models in literary history are considered a 19th-century inheritance, of which the present-day validity is often questioned nowadays. The objective of this project is to build a computational model of the history of Dutch-language literature in the Low Countries (13th-20th century). This diachronic model will use techniques from computational text analysis ("Distant Reading") to track changes in the stylistic and thematic characteristics of texts. Importantly, this will be a bottom-up model: it will be created in a data-driven manner, instead of setting out from existing (potentially preconceived) hypotheses. This model will be carefully interpreted and compared to the state of the art in traditional literary scholarship. This will allow us to verify and better understand the validity of established periodization models of Dutch literary history. This project will greatly contribute to the ongoing international debate about the integration of traditional, "close reading" methods in literary studies and new, computational methods for "distant reading".

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Willaert Frank
• Co-promoter: Daelemans Walter
• Fellow: Kestemont Mike

Research team(s)

• Institute for the Study of Literature in the Low Countries (ISLN)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

This project represents a research contract awarded by the University of Antwerp. The supervisor provides the Antwerp University research mentioned in the title of the project under the conditions stipulated by the university.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Kestemont Mike

Research team(s)

• Institute for the Study of Literature in the Low Countries (ISLN)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

A lot of scholarly attention has recently been paid to medieval book production. It was complex to produce the voluminous manuscripts that survive from e.g. early fifteenth century Paris. A major scholarly problem involves the scribes of manuscripts: sometimes up to 20 copyists seem to have contributed to a copy, but their handwritings can be extremely difficult to distinguish. Developing objective methodologies to discriminate between these fellow scribes, is therefore an important challenge in medieval studies. In my PhD I have argued for the potential of "stylometric" approaches in this respect. Typically scribes adopted a highly individual spelling profile in such a consequent way that algorithms are often able to automatically detect a scribe's handwriting in a previously unseen copy. Such text-based identifications can be achieved using a combination of quantitative techniques from Computational Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence. The Online Froissart is a valuable digital resource in this respect, presenting a machine-readable edition of many early fifteenth century, Parisian manuscripts of the Chroniques by Jean Froissart. This Small Project targets the focused expansion of the Online Froissart, because it is ideal for research into the text-based recognition of late-medieval scribes. In a variety of ways, the present proposal complements my recently started postdoc project, in which linguistic scribal attributions are a major interest.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Kestemont Mike

Research team(s)

• Institute for the Study of Literature in the Low Countries (ISLN)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

In this project I will further explore the applicability of the Stylome Hypothesis in medieval literature: 1. I will apply computational stylometry to medieval prose. Because so many (anonymous) medieval prose texts survive, stylometric techniques for authorship attribution in prose are highly relevant. The proposed case study targets religious prose (13th/14th century) from Brabant. 2. Throughout medieval Europe, a lot of Latin literature was produced. I propose to extend my research to Latin, via the original case study of the Flemish monks (11th century) who were attracted by English nobility to write Latin biographies.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Willaert Frank
• Co-promoter: Daelemans Walter
• Fellow: Kestemont Mike

Research team(s)

• Institute for the Study of Literature in the Low Countries (ISLN)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

Nearly all of Middle Dutch narrative literature (ca. 1200-1500) was written in rhyming couplets, which is why rhyme words are extremely suitable for the comparative study of Middle Dutch epic texts and authors. My research specifically focuses on three aspects: (a) the evolution of rhyme in the vernacular epic poetry of the medieval Low Countries; (b) the usefulness of rhyme words for authorship verification and attribution; (c) the correlation between rhyme word vocabulary and epic subgenres. My methodology is mainly borrowed from literary stylistics, computational stylometry and computational language technology. As such, this project envisages a quantitative study into the stylistic creativity of Middle Dutch epic poets.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Willaert Frank
• Co-promoter: Daelemans Walter
• Fellow: Kestemont Mike

Research team(s)

• Institute for the Study of Literature in the Low Countries (ISLN)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

Nearly all of Middle Dutch narrative literature (ca. 1200-1500) was written in rhyming couplets, which is why rhyme words are extremely suitable for the comparative study of Middle Dutch epic texts and authors. My research specifically focuses on three aspects: (a) the evolution of rhyme in the vernacular epic poetry of the medieval Low Countries; (b) the usefulness of rhyme words for authorship verification and attribution; (c) the correlation between rhyme word vocabulary and epic subgenres. My methodology is mainly borrowed from literary stylistics, computational stylometry and computational language technology. As such, this project envisages a quantitative study into the stylistic creativity of Middle Dutch epic poets.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Willaert Frank
• Co-promoter: Daelemans Walter
• Fellow: Kestemont Mike

Research team(s)

• Institute for the Study of Literature in the Low Countries (ISLN)

Project type(s)

• Research Project