For innovation to happen it is not enough that new ideas and technologies are being invented. Cultural factors play an essential role in their acceptance and appropriation. Recent scholarship hypothesises that Europeans after 1650 became more receptive to new technology and innovation than their ancestors, and so enabled the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution. The spread of new knowledge and techniques among scholars and specialists between 1500-1850 is indeed well-documented. Yet since acceptance by specialists does not guarantee wider acceptance, we will study how and to what effect, new knowledge actually anchored among the wider public. This project focuses on the circulation and evaluation of new knowledge, ideas and technologies among a non-specialist public of middle-class authors in the Netherlands, who kept handwritten chronicles to record events and phenomena that they considered important. We develop a method to use them in large numbers and comparatively, so as to track and analyse the circulation, evaluation and acceptance of old and new ideas and information over time and spatially. We will create a large high quality annotated corpus of texts, develop computational tools to trace patterns in topics, perspectives and appreciation of novelty and to alert us to passages that require further, qualitative analysis by close reading. In this way we will assess the circulation of new ideas, their reception, and the impact on attitudes to novelty and tradition in wider society.

This research proposal brings together two of the most pressing issues our society is facing: social participation and a circular economy. It aims to develop creative approaches to a number of key aspects of these combined issues, especially the question how we can rethink our urban environment in terms of metabolic flows and adapt these flows to deal with issues such as resource scarcity while simultaneously involving design professionals and students as participants in such processes of (radical) change. To address these issues in conjunction while making these relevant for the design practice, this research proposes both a theoretical (meta) reflection on key concepts and approaches and a concrete, hands-on approach to test them in practice. The focus will be on how the experimental and innovative capacities of the design practice can help re-frame and re-make flows of residual material into resources, what roles the various participants can take in this process, and how their participation can inform the design practice, education, and research. To achieve this, research methods from the humanities and design research are joined. The end results will be: (1) The development of a physical and social interface of collaboration between university, HBO, and (experienced and starting) professionals around flows of residual material; (2) A final exhibition and booklet visualizing how design research and thinking can help turn residual materials into resources; (3) An ethno-methodological description of the participatory process happening in and around the interface leading to a report; (4) Two academic articles by the applicants.

This project has investigated how events are framed in Dutch. Framing means that we choose words and expressions to color the world around us. The unique data-to-text method has produced a dataset containing many Dutch texts in which the same event is described. This makes it clear how we describe those events differently. This data makes it possible to develop better technology to understand texts and extract what has happened regardless of how it is described, but also to recognize the perspective of the author of the texts.

Europe, commonly imagined as a collective of nation-states with distinct national histories, shares an imperial past. Imperial places approaches this imperialism of the nineteenth and twentieth century as a process in which European states cooperated rather than competed with each other, facilitated by their economic, political, academic, infrastructural and cultural networks. Such transnational networks were essential to the formation of a shared European imperial culture which developed throughout society. The project analyses six (types of) physical sites in Europe that belong to these networks, and one in a former colony. Structures and institutions like government buildings, ports and docklands, museums, industrial facilities and shops or the headquarters of missionary societies became nodes at imperial crossroads and representations of imperial culture in Europe. By focusing on such ‘imperial places’, the project aims to contribute to a better understanding of Europe’s imperial history. Moreover it investigates how the emergence of a European imperial culture intersected with or was absorbed in national historiographies.

This project aims to redefine the history of socialist responses to migration by going beyond Eurocentric perspectives. It connects primary sources from different regions and brings together scholarly literature from different fields to challenge simplistic economic explanations and reveal the racialized aspects of solidarity across labour and socialist movements between 1880 and 1914. In doing so, it highlights the impact of racist movements and anti-Asian campaigns in Australia, Southern Africa, and the Americas on socialist views of migration in Western Europe. The project’s transnational approach aims to enhance historical understanding and provide insights into contemporary debates on migration and integration.