Is there such thing as European identity? In the Renaissance, language and religion were factors not only of division but also of connection. Cities were the facilitators of these connections. This project investigates how Renaissance bestsellers explored these connection processes and contributed to ideas of Europe as a diverse community. 

This project investigates how conceptions of Europe as a shared cultural space were cultivated in the early modern era. By examining Renaissance literary ‘bestsellers’, defined as fictional narratives that enjoyed popularity across Europe and social strata, we uncover how an incipient sense of Europe as a secular cultural community started to develop, precisely in a time of great linguistic diversity, and of bitter conflict caused by the Reformation. 

Studies of Renaissance perceptions of Europe have typically focused on politics, knowledge, art and cartography; literature is often overlooked, despite its long-established role in creating and perpetuating images of complex cultural ideas. Building on recent scholarship that has exposed the wide mobility of Renaissance fiction, this project offers the first sustained examination of the literary imagination in the development of Renaissance understandings of Europe. 

We focus on three themes that shaped Renaissance ideas of Europe: cities, language and religion, by systematically investigating a comprehensive corpus of popular fictional narratives, and by combining literary analysis with a cutting-edge linguistic research tool. Discovering Europe hypothesizes that fiction forcefully expresses the idea that linguistic and religious diversity were factors not only of division but also of connection, and cities were the places where these connections were established. 

Knowing what binds and divides Europeans is pertinent to intra-European relations and everyday policy-making. Answers are often informed by the past and it is therefore important to be knowledgeable about Europe’s shared history. Insights into long-term developments allow citizens and policymakers to make informed decisions about the future of European cooperation on a pan-European, national and local level. 

• Francesca Barbera Kipreos MA
• dr. Anton Bruder

The aim of this infrastructure project is to create the first set of deep neural language models pre-trained on historical textual material (Dutch and English) from different time periods. This semantic encoding infrastructure, or ‘MacBERTh’ , will serve as an invaluable SSH research tool that enables new ways of analysing historical text: by making the underlying meaning of words, phrases and abstract sentence patterns accessible, searchable, and analysable in a bottom-up, data-driven way, the offered infrastructure will allow researchers from the present to uncover and draw connections between concepts and ideas from the past.
The technology underlying this infrastructure is based on a crucial insight from distributional semantics, which states that the linguistic context in which words and phrases appear provides a good approximation of their meaning. Based on this idea, a number of powerful computational models have been developed to create detailed, compressed linguistic representations when trained on large bodies of text. These representations have already proven to be crucial in addressing various challenges in computational linguistics (NLP/NLU) and related disciplines. Yet, these models have not yet been exploited to study meaning representation in historical language. This gap will be filled by ‘MacBERTh’

• prof. dr. Els Stronks

• dr. Lauren Fonteyn (Universiteit Leiden
• main applicant)

Current approaches to addressing the medical, financial and work-related problems of individuals in groups often fail to actually help them. Researchers and professionals focus on what they perceive as the average individual, which prevents them from recognizing those who (partly) fall outside their scope. These unseen people typically suffer from an intersecting complexity of social problems, ailments, or belonging to marginalized groups. There is a consistent lack of data about the needs of these intersectional groups. A case in point is period poverty. While this is an acknowledged problem in The Netherlands, there is no data on the extent of the problem (NOS 25/11/2020 https://nos.nl/artikel/2357978-schotland-maakt-als-eersteland-ter-wereld-menstruatieproducten-gratis.html). Our aim is to find ways to collect this type of data. We want to see the unseen and hear the unheard – people currently not included in abstract categories, datasets, or algorithms. This project will thus improve our understanding of the mismatch between the studied sample and the underlying population, and formulate suggestions to make data collection efforts more inclusive. We will do so by collaborating with professionals in the field to identify people who are not represented by the data used by researchers and governments to make decisions. We will listen to their stories and use these to inform us on how existing methods of medical, financial and work-related aid can be improved or replaced.
 

 Example of different, intersecting conditions, which  current research efforts fail to adequately cover. 
 
We concentrate on three major contexts: the hospital, the workplace and the neighbourhood. Here, we suspect, are many people who need help but are beyond the scope of those who provide it because their intersecting complexities go unnoticed. In a ten-month pilot, we will a) investigate the current methods of identifying the needs of unseen populations, and b) assess whether and to what extent these methods sufficiently reach the individuals within these populations. Specifically, we will 1) identify and learn from best practices in patient groups who have managed to make their voice heard by collaborating with scientists, 2) examine how and to what extent HR-managers listen to the voices of LGBTI+ employees (e.g., through LGBTI+ employee resource groups), a relatively invisible group in organizations, and 3) examine to what extent community projects in neighborhoods succeed in meeting the needs of low socioeconomic status individuals and in making sure these projects are inclusive. This project will create a close and sustained dialogue between disciplines, domains and fields. By means of monthly roundtable sessions for all team members, we facilitate cross-fertilization of our knowledge, experience and insights. Each session is structured according to the following steps, that are well-established in interdisciplinary studies: 1) disciplinary grounding, 2) perspective taking, 3) common ground, and 4) integration. The sessions will be moderated by Flatland Agency, a consultancy that employs design-thinking methodology and visual thinking to enable team members to arrive at the same page and devise a methodology for inter- and transdisciplinary co-creation that can be used by other researchers that are part of the alliance.
 
 

• dr. Martine Veldhuizen
• dr. Merel van Goch
• prof. dr. Jojanneke van der Toorn

• dr. Daniël Lakens
• dr. Daniël Tetteroo
• Dr. Mathias Funk
• Dr. Monique Simons
• Dr. Marianne Boes
• Manon Klarenaar MA

Humour and religion are often seen as uneasy bedfellows, but the imaginative literature of the English Reformation abounded in jokes about contentious religious issues. This project investigates how humour made people feel strong in the face of religious anxiety and contributed to a more peaceful society.