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My vision > I/O Magazine > October 2020
Since 1 January 2020,
Joris van Eijnatten has led
the Netherlands eScience
Center. Before that, he was
Professor of Cultural History
at Utrecht University and VU
University Amsterdam.
HOOKED
ON DIGITISATION
By Amanda Verdonk Photo Ivar Pel
With his new position as director of the Netherlands
eScience Center, historian Joris van Eijnatten makes his
entrance in a world still dominated by the exact sciences.
His “hidden” agenda: enthusing researchers in the social
sciences and humanities for digital research methods.
‘As a digital historian, I work with data all the time, so I con-
sider myself in part a natural scientist. I have been advoca -
ting the use of digital methods in the humanities for a long
time already, but it is a difficult objective to achieve. The
eScience Center was established nine years ago to accelerate
digitisation in science. We finance research projects, mainly
in kind, by providing expertise. Besides our support staff, we
employ about sixty research software engineers or RSEs –
a relatively new profession that is not yet well-positioned
either nationally or internationally. RSEs are not just support
staff who write a piece of code, but applied scientists who
speak the language of different disciplines.’
SERVE ALL DISCIPLINES
‘With our new strategy for the next five years, we want to
serve all disciplines. We want to create a community of
researchers who are able to find and apply digital methods
themselves, giving them more autonomy. This also applies
to humanities researchers. I think they should be less depen-
dent on computer scientists, because the two groups don’t
always speak each other’s language. A discussion between
the blind and the deaf doesn’t work. If you become more
proficient in using digital methods and start looking into the
black box of these methods, a whole world will open up for
you with potentially very interesting outcomes.’
‘We live in a world in which artificial intelligence is entrenched
in everything. The universities of today must train a new
generation of citizens who are better equipped to deal with
this technology. But the history curriculum, for example, is
still the same as fifty years ago. A basic course in algorithmic
thinking and a digital thread throughout the educational
programme is becoming unavoidable. Other groups, such
as biologists, could also benefit from digitisation, for
instance by studying satellite images or tagged animals
with GPS transmitters.’
‘I started programming in Python, the simplest language.
I’m totally hooked! Every week I try to write a piece of code.
Coding gives you access to gigantic datasets, such as parlia-
mentary data available from 1814 or newspapers from the
th
17 century onwards. Data analysis enables you to oversee
huge periods at once, generate research output in no time
and display it in beautiful and intuitive visualisations. I think
that’s fantastic.’