Personalia
Joris van Eijnatten, born in Málaga, Spain, in 1964. Ph.D. from VU University Amsterdam. Professor of Cultural History at Utrecht University.
KB Fellow (1 Sept 2016 – 31 Jan 2017)
Mining for Europe. Detecting historical patterns in big data
Research Question
How did images of Europe change over time in millions of newspaper articles published between 1890 and 1990?
Project Description
How did images of Europe change over time in millions of newspaper articles published between 1890 and 1990? I will answer this question in different ways: by tracing the popularity of all but forgotten European ideals (such as ‘pan-Europa’, which surfaced between the two World Wars), the development of European competitions (such as the Eurovision Song Contest and the UEFA Champions League), and the way weather reports defined Europe’s geographical boundaries. In cooperation with the National Library of the Netherlands in The Hague I will use computers to trace cultural patterns in the past based on huge amounts of data.
Selected Publications
– van Eijnatten, J., Pieters, A.H.L.M. & Verheul, J. (2013). Big Data for Global History. The Transformative Promise of Digital Humanities – BMGN – The Low Countries Historical Review. BMGN – The Low Countries Historical Review, 128 (4), (pp. 55-77)
– van Eijnatten, J. (2014). Van dorpsplein tot cyberspace – een cultuurgeschiedenis van de communicatie. (592 p.). Amsterdam: Prometheus – Bert Bakker
– van Eijnatten, J. (2015). Beyond Diversity – The Steady State of Reference Cultures. International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity, 3 (3), (pp. 1-8)