Every year there are more than 15,000 hospital admissions due to avoidable misuse of medicines in the Netherlands. Often, this has to do with the patient's unintentional improper use caused by either hard to understand information or cognitive problems.

In order to overcome these misunderstandings, we need to better understand the explicit and implicit attribution of meaning to medicines as part of the information processing.

Research on and use of sensitive data involving AV-recordings requires an infrastructure where both the data and the research environment are optimal in terms of safeguards for the data and the research instruments. In HoMed we will develop a methodology to disclose sensitive AV-material through speech recognition. The methodology has the immediate potential to be employed in many other domains where sensitive AV-material needs to be transcribed and analysed. As a highly relevant and urgent use case, the HoMed project will expand CLARIAH’s infrastructure to do just that fora solution in the domain of pharmaceutical humanities and social studies (PharmSSH).

The consortium will develop an infrastructure in which an existing “generic” Dutch ASR, built for the CLARIAH infrastructure, is adapted to the MedPharm domain on the semantic level, using a domain adaptation component (language model). In the second step the ASR is adapted on both the semantic and the acoustic level using sensitive inhouse data of Nivel, such that the AV-recordings themselves will not leave the Nivel building. The resulting ASR component will be made available at Nivel and in the CLARIAH Infrastructure. The resulting acoustic models (AMs) and the language model (LM) of the recogniser, and the metadata of the AV consultations at Nivel will be made available to the research community at large. Due to the open source character of the ASR, the models can also be employed in related projects such as Care2Report and CAIRE-lab to which HoMed is linked. The Stichting Open Spraaktechnologie will take up the distribution of the models.

Once available in the Media Suite, the AV-recordings and transcriptions are ready to be used for further analysis along the lines of the levelled approach, explained in Van der Molen et al. (2018) and depicted below. This will be evaluated in pilot research projects in the second year of the project with a feedback loop for improvements of the tools in the proposed infrastructure (notably the ASR performance and output).

From the HoMed website

• dr. Arjan van Hessen
• dr. B.J. (Berrie) van der Molen

• Henk van den Heuvel (Radboud University)
• Sandra van Dulmen (Nivel)
• Roeland Ordelman (Sound & Vision)
• Cristian Tejedor Garcia (Radboud University)

In this research pilot, historians will test and extend CLARIAH’s recipe AVResearcherXL. We will study the role of historical public debates on drugs and regulation (1945-1990) in newspapers, on radio and television. These debates are shifting in time and often fragmented since drugs (e.g. heroin, amphetamines and cannabis) move between medical, criminal and recreational spheres. We study the historically dynamic relation between governmental drug regulation and public discourse. To do that, we aim to enable our research strategy, which is to trace and understand public debates by alternating between distant reading and close reading, across textual and AV-datasets. AVResearcherXL is primarily developed as a distant reading tool with a focus on media representation research. By enriching the AVResearcherXL recipe with additional CLARIAH components we will make it suitable for alternating cross-media forms of distant and close reading. This will significantly improve the employability of AVRearcherXL for humanities researchers.

• dr. B.J. (Berrie) van der Molen
• dr. Jasmijn van Gorp

• dr. Steven Claeyssens (KB)
• dr. Eva Baaren (NISV)
• dr. Roeland Ordelman (NISV)

• dr. W. (Wouter) Klein

This project proposes, firstly, that the emergence of trans-national reference cultures was one of the most significant consequences of cultural encounters within the European framework between 1815 and 1992, and, secondly, that these encounters were asymmetrical. ASYMENC investigates how these reference cultures, defined as spatially and temporally identifiable cultures that offer a model to other cultures, have been established in public debates. The availability of large digital data collections enables us for the first time to study long-term developments and transformations of such cultural imaginaries in a systematic, longitudinal, and quantifiable way. This enables us to chart the regional and national public discourses in which collective frames of orientation and cultural cross-referencing to European "others" have been established. ASYMENC explores how public discourses about reference cultures contributed to the formation of communities, from local to trans-national, and thus foster adherence or resistance to particular versions of “Europe”.

ASYMENC strives to accomplish three related objectives: a. explore the concept of reference cultures as a way to understand asymmetrical cultural encounters within Europe; b. develop a digital humanities demonstrator to map and analyse the vectors of asymmetrical encounters in European public debates; and c. build an interdisciplinary consortium of three European research centres around the crosscultural study of printed media in Europe by means of multilingual text mining.

ASYMENC uses the innovative digital humanities methodology of multi-lingual text mining to map
the dynamics, intensity, and direction of intercultural references within European public discourse. Innovative semantic-text analytics will be applied to large corpora of digitized newspapers in the Benelux countries and the surrounding countries that served as reference cultures. The demonstrator will be applied to case studies in which regional, national, and European dimensions of cultural encounters are visible, such as references to European urban centres, mass media, and consumer products.

• prof. dr. Jaap Verheul
• prof. dr. Joris van Eijnatten

• Prof.dr. Caroline Sporleder (Digital Humanities Centre / Trier University)
• Dr. Ulrich Tiedau (Centre for Digital Humanities / University College London)

Searching public discourse. Research into our culture is about understanding conversations and debates as forms of public discourse. https://www.esciencecenter.nl/project/spudisc

• prof. dr. Jaap Verheul

• prof.dr Maarten de Rijke
• prof.dr Ed Tan