Rens Bod, born in Bergh, the Netherlands, in 1965. Ph.D. from the University of Amsterdam. Professor of Computational and Digital Humanities at the University of Amsterdam.
Guest of the Rector (1 February 2013 – 30 June 2013)
Structure Induction in the Humanities
Except for the field of computational linguistics, the computational exploration of the humanities is still in its infancy. Much effort has been devoted to the creation of digital research corpora of musical, literary, historical and cultural heritage data, but the search for new patterns in these data – let alone their automatic analysis – remains far behind the state-of-the-art in computational linguistics. In this project I aim to extend and generalize methods from computational linguistics towards the automatic analysis of musical and literary corpora. Initial work with a successful structure-induction technique has obtained promising results on language and music, and has recently been extended to the automatic analysis of literature (KNAW-programme “The Riddle of Literary Quality”). My aim is to write a comprehensive monograph on computational analysis in the humanities – the first of its kind.
Selected Publications
R. Bod, 2010. De Vergeten Wetenschappen: Een Geschiedenis van de Humaniora. Prometheus. To appear in English as R. Bod, 2012. A History of the Humanities: The Forgotten Sciences. Oxford University Press.
R. Bod, 2009. From Exemplar to Grammar: A Probabilistic Analogy-based Model of Language Learning. Cognitive Science, 33(5), 752-793.
R. Bod, 2002. A Unified Model of Structural Organization in Language and Music. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 17(2002): 289-308.