The research engineers combine technical expertise on data and digital methods with an understanding of the specific interests and needs of humanities researchers. Since the Summer of 2019 the CREATE Lab is housed in BG1, next to the 4D Research Lab, with which we coordinate activities and share expertise - as such already anticipating the establishment of the joint Humanities Lab/Research Building. If you have any further questions please contact createlab@uva.nl

Advice

• We can give advice on how to prepare your research project, or to model your data so that it can be integrated in a database that connects to other databases with cultural heritage data. This includes the preparations that are needed to publish your data as Linked Open Data.
• We can provide a data model that suits your needs for your research.

Management

We manage databases for various research projects and can set up a new database for your existing data (e.g. spreadsheets, annotations). We facilitate searching in large datasets in an intuitive and user-friendly way. We set up and manage interactive research environments that can be used to enter, aggregate or inspect data such as images, texts or other material. This includes the setting up of annotation environments to enrich the aggregated data.

Collection

• We can digitize archival material (scanning, OCR/HTR), improve the data quality (e.g. correcting OCR-mistakes) and further enrich the data (e.g. standardizing terms). Also for Old-Dutch.
• We can assist in data collection from web resources (by scraping), or scanning documents (by OCR/HTR).
• We can normalize data, link data to existing thesauri (e.g. GeoNames, Getty AAT), while keeping provenance information.
• We do data enrichment through entity extraction. This involves the automatic identification of entities in a text (for instance as ‘Person’ or ‘Movie’), parsing date notations, and geocoding data by (relative) location description. This also includes providing linguistic information (e.g. part-of-speech), text classification by subject (e.g. topic modelling), or sentiment analysis.
• We can assist in data analysis on geographical data (GIS).

Presentation

• We set up and manage websites for presentational purposes with interactive maps, search interfaces for databases and other visualisations, for instance for usage during demos, conference talks, and workshops.
• We can visualize data on maps, in graphs, in lists, or in other applicable formats and present this on a webpage. This also includes the outcome of a network analysis (e.g. from Gephi). In collaboration with the UvA 4D Research Lab we build, present, and annotate 3D models.