.. _keynote:

Keynote
=======

Monday 6 July, 19:00

----


.. raw:: html

    <iframe width="1280" height="720" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nBsQyJoOdhQ?list=PLN0wiGwlUlbdOxBATb33IgL0AOCKdnirg" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>


----


*To be or not to be*: Identifying names, persons and groups in unstructured data of the Dutch Golden Age
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

.. _ref-cv-heuvel:

| **Prof. dr. Charles van den Heuvel**
| *Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands*


This presentation addresses the question how to facilitate digital prosopography
in large research infrastructures, such as the infrastructure in development by
Dutch academic and cultural heritage institutions: *Golden Agents: Creative
Industries and the Making of the Dutch Golden Age* that combines semantic web and
multi-agent technologies. Such an infrastructure needs to support both
researchers that are interested in individuals and those that want to focus on
groups. It requires digital methods for identifying enormous quantities of names
of rather anonymous people in unstructured data and link these to the more
well-known names in structured data that often are used as a kind of ground
truth. The latter touches upon a traditional methodological problem, i.e. the
dichotomy between elite culture and the mass and the bias in data (-selection)
as a result of that (Lawrence Stone, 1971). This dichotomy again comes to the
foreground in digital prospopography in recent pleas for more critical
approaches of individuals and social groups within the Dutch Golden Age whose
wealth was partially based on slavery. With these problems in mind the general
question is how can digital methods and models support prosopography in the
world of big data and deal with the mixture of identified persons and of names
that probably never can be linked to a person?

----

**Charles van den Heuvel** is Head of Department of History of Knowledge of the
Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands of the Royal Netherlands
Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and Professor of Digital Methods and History
at the University of Amsterdam. He has a background in history of art,
specialized in the history of town planning, fortification and architecture of
the Early Modern Period (16th-17th Centuries) and worked in several cultural
heritage institutions. Recent interests are digital humanities (in particular
spatial humanities), history of knowledge (in particular the Digital Republic of
Letters) and history of library and information sciences (in particular the
history of classification).

Currently he is leading the Large Investment project funded by The Netherlands
Science Organization (NWO): *Golden Agents: Creative Industries and the Making of
the Dutch Golden Age* and the NWO - Smart Culture Big Data and Digital Humanities
project: *Virtual Interiors as Interfaces for Big Historical Data Research.
Spatially Enhanced Publications of the Creative Industries of the Dutch Golden
Age*.