Historian Dr Pieter Van den Heede, employed as a lecturer and researcher at the Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication, has been awarded the competitive 2025 CLARIAH Research Fellowship. The CLARIAH fellowship programme is meant to further improve research in the fields of digital humanities and the social sciences, in particular through a strengthening of SSHOC-NL, a consortium of Dutch research infrastructures. Pieter Van den Heede will collaborate with dr Berber Hagedoorn (Faculty of Arts, University of Groningen), specialist in screen cultures and European audiovisual cultural memory, on the project.
The evolution of Dutch public news broadcasting
Van den Heede’s research project is called COMMEM-CON, short for Analysing Dutch Commemorative Configurations Through Public News Broadcasting (1925-Present). He explores how digital research methods, and text mining in particular, can be used to complement the study of Dutch mnemohistory, i.e., how public remembrance in the Netherlands has changed over time. The main research question is how commemorative discourse in Dutch public news broadcasting has evolved since its beginnings (for radio around 1925 and television around 1956).
The study combines the study of historical culture and natural language processing (NLP) to analyse which people, events, and entities have been commemorated through Dutch public news broadcasting. By using text mining methods, this study aims to provide wider overviews of how the Dutch commemorative landscape has evolved over time. This serves to complement existing research, which has often focused on particular case studies.
About the CLARIAH Research Fellowship
CLARIAH (acronym for: Common Lab Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities in the Netherlands) develops, facilitates and stimulates the use of digitized source corpora and digital research tools for the humanities. With the CLARIAH Research Fellowship, CLARIAH aims to improve SSHOC-NL, a Dutch sector-wide infrastructural initiative at the intersection between the humanities (CLARIAH) and social sciences (ODISSEI, Open Data Instructure for Social Science and Economic Innovations).
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Social Science and Humanities Open Cloud for the Netherlands (SSHOC-NL)