Researcher-in-residence at the KB

If you’re starting a career in the sciences and want to use our digital collection for research, why not become a researcher-in-residence at the KB? You can use our databases and collaborate with our Digital Humanities team.

KB Lab

Since 2014, the KB has been inviting budding scientists to conduct research using tools and datasets from the online KB Lab. Scientists will work on their own research using data collections from large digitisation projects, e.g. from historical newspapers. Together with KB employees, they develop digital techniques that can provide answers to their research question. In order to attract foreign researchers, the KB Lab is largely written in English.

Collaboration between researchers and the KB

As a researcher, you will work on solutions for specific questions with the support of our programmers and content experts. In turn, we learn from your wishes and methods and can thereby improve our services. What are the wishes of the researcher? What methods does he/she use? This is a mutually beneficial collaboration between the researchers and the KB.

Sharing results with other researchers

The results (tools and datasets) will also be available in the KB Lab for other researchers, who can use and possibly expand on it. While working at the KB, the researchers-in-residence share their experiences via a blog.

Annual call for proposals

You can submit a proposal every year with which you have a chance to become a researcher-in-residence at the KB. More information about the call for proposals can be found via 'news' on the KB Lab website.

Researchers-in-residence since 2014

Current researchers-in-residence (2022/2023)

  • Vera Provatorova MSc (UvA) - Research question: To what extent is entity linking on Dutch-language archival data affected by entity overshadowing, and how can we make EL systems robust against it?
  • Dr Jesper Verhoef (EUR) - Research question: What does the Dutch queer web sphere look like and how has it changed over time?
  • Dr Ir Willemijn Elkhuizen (TUD) - Research question: How to capture/create digital, multi-sensory representations of cultural heritage artifacts? And how can technologies like AR and VR be exploited to interact with these digital representations?
  • Dr Karin de Wild (UL) - Research question: How to build a collection, that includes a selection of curated websites and derived dataset(s), that will allow investigating the history of museums on the Web?

Previous participants in the programme include:

  • Dr Andreas van Cranenburgh (RUG) - Research question: How predictable is canonicity in texts?
  • Simon Kemper MA (UL) - Research question: Is it possible to improve entity recognition by linking historically related languages?
  • Dr Giovanni Colavizza (UvA) (2020) - Research question: How does the quality of optical character recognition affect further analyses?
  • Dr Seyran Khademi (TUD) (2020) - Research question: How do we simultaneously examine modern and ancient images?
  • Dr Kaspar Beelen (UvA) (2019) - Research question: How have gender stereotypes changed over the course of the last two centuries?
  • Dr Annemieke Romein (UGent) (2019) - Research question: How do we improve the OCR quality of early modern legal texts and can we automatically add metadata to these texts?
  • Antoine Peris MA (TUD) (2018) - Research question: How can we use computers to investigate how the image of cities in local and national newspapers has developed?
  • Dr Cynthia Liem (TUD) (2018) - Research question: How can we trace references to pieces of music in Delpher's digitised newspapers and then connect them to the catalogue of the Muziekweb music library of the Central Discotheque Rotterdam?
  • Thomas Smits MA (RU) (2017) - Research question: How can you sort images from digitised Dutch newspapers by type of image?
  • Melvin Wevers MA (UU) (2017) - Research question: How can textual analysis be used to study the role of the United States as a reference culture in 20th-century Dutch newspaper debates about consumer goods?
  • Dr Frank Harbers (RUG) (2016) - Research question: How can you investigate the development of the journalistic form, in particular genre classification, through automated content analysis?
  • Puck Wildschut MPhil (RU) (2016) - Research question: How can you use computers to study literature and reading methods?
  • Dr Martijn Kleppe (EUR) (2015) - Research question: Can we develop techniques to study the reuse of photographs in different media and over time?
  • Dr Desmond Elliot (CWI) (2015)
  • Dr Pim Huijnen (UU) (2015)
  • Dr Samuël Kruizinga (UvA) (2014-2015)
  • Dr Jiyin He (UvA) (2014)

Want to know more?

Interested in working as a researcher-in residence but still have questions? Check out our FAQ.

Contact person

Michel de Gruijter
AI & Digital Scholarship Advisor