Franciska de Jong appointed Professor of eResearch for the Humanities

As of 1 September, Prof. Franciska de Jong has been appointed Professor of eResearch for the Humanities at the Faculty of Humanities. This new chair focuses on the development, application and evaluation of digital infrastructures for humanities research.

The appointment strengthens the expertise in Digital Humanities at Utrecht University. The chair will be installed at the Department of Languages, Literature and Communication and will be closely linked to the Utrecht Institute of Linguistics (UiL OTS).

As of September 2015, Franciska de Jong is also the Executive Director of CLARIN ERIC, the governing body of CLARIN which has its statutory seat at Utrecht University. CLARIN is the Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure for the humanities and social sciences in Europe. The main objective of CLARIN is to provide scholars in the humanities and social sciences seamless access to digital language data and processing tools all across Europe. The activities in the context of the new chair will be largely dedicated to the ambitions of CLARIN ERIC.

Franciska de Jong was professor of language technology at the Universiteit Twente (UT) until September. She is also director of the Erasmus Studio for e-research at the Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam (EUR) where she also holds a chair in e-research for the social sciences and the humanities. Since 2008 she has been vice-president of the governing board of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).

She studied Dutch language and literature at Utrecht University, did a PhD track in theoretical linguistics and made the switch to language technology in 1985 when she started working on machine translation at Philips Research.

Currently her main research interests are in multimedia indexing, spoken document retrieval, text mining, access technology for digital libraries, interview archives and cultural heritage collections, and e-research in general.