photo from http://www.huygensinstituut.knaw.nl
Our last lecture here in the Netherlands was given by Karina van Dalen-Oskam, head of the department of ICT Texts at the Huygens Instituut. She gave a fascinating introduction to digital and computational humanities and how she uses textual analysis to find and present new information about medieval texts. Another project — a very cool one — she has been involved in is the transcription, annotation and translation of Vincent van Gogh’s letters. The website, vangoghletters.org, is an amazing example of how digital resources can be used in literary studies.
This weekend was entirely free — no lectures, no transferring to different hotels, no suggested day trips, etc. — so I spent a couple of days exploring the area surrounding Rotterdam. Since I traveled mostly by train yesterday, today was a day for biking. The late summer weather was lovely, so it was a perfect day for it.
Poppy bought a bike in Hoenderloo (near Hoge Veluwe) and rode it back to Rotterdam last weekend, so she had the wheels to join Molly, Jonathan and me on an easy ride to Den Haag by way of Delft. Continue reading ‘Biking way more than necessary’
Trent left this weekend free for self-directed exploration, so a lot of people from the group here decided to go to Brugge, Belgium. A few of us stayed in Rotterdam to explore the surrounding area, though, and I am one of them. Today was kind of rainy, so I ditched my bike in favor of the train and went to Utrecht with Poppy and Jonathan. Trent has told us it is one of his favorite cities, and we could see why. The city isn’t too big, but there are a lot of interesting things to see and do. We actually ran out of time, so I’ll have to go back someday.
One of my favorite things to do when I travel is to climb towers, so I was delighted to discover that the tallest tower in the Netherlands is the Domtoren in Utrecht. Continue reading ‘Utrecht’
Today we had another chance to marvel at the brilliance of Andrea Scharnhorst. Her lecture was about visual interfaces to knowledge, which she said have taken on more importance in information sciences. The reason, she said, is that with the flood of information available to the public now, visualizations can help people see patterns and important points more easily. The problem becomes finding the right visualization to present the information. Some good examples of information visualizations can be found on the Places & Spaces website.
Maarten Marx, an information systems professor at the University of Amsterdam, gave our guest lecture today about using technology to do automatic quantitative analysis of publicly available records. He talked mainly about his Political Mashup project, which aims to use data from newspapers and online sources to connect political topics and entities. As more and more text becomes available for analysis, having a way to automatically process and analyze it will be increasingly important. Text will be the main data of the future, Maarten said, and there will be new opportunities for research and quantitative analysis.
After lecture today we took the Metro to The Hague to tour the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the National Library of the Netherlands. It has more than 3.5 million items in its collection and adds more every day because it is required to keep a copy of every print item published in the Netherlands. It was very cool seeing the seemingly endless rows of books in the archive (there are more than 50 kilometers of books). Anyone can browse the library’s catalog, but it costs €15 annually for a library card that allows you to check out items.
I’m not quite sure how I feel about that €15 fee for a library card. Yes, libraries — 
especially archival libraries such as the National Library — are expensive to operate and maintain. And €15 a year is really cheap. However, the idea of limiting access with even so modest a fee kind of sticks. I’d really like for the National Library to be free. At least it’s free to look at the super-cool old books in the exhibition hall of the library.
Today was a much-needed day of rest. I went to church this morning and got a spiritual recharge — something I’ve been overlooking since coming to Europe three weeks ago. The members of the congregation were very friendly and welcoming, and a couple of them even translated the services for me. The only weird thing was trying to sing hymns in Dutch, but I did give it a go. I may have even learned a tiny bit of Dutch pronunciation from it. After church I did laundry, wrote postcards to my family, and went for a short bike ride. I think I may be ready for another intense week now.
After hours of riding public transportation to get to and from the Kroller-Muller Museum yesterday, it was time to stretch out my legs a bit. I decided a bike ride to UNESCO world heritage site Kinderdijk was just the thing. It’s not too far from Rotterdam, but my first attempt at trying to find the place took me two hours — and I ended up back in Rotterdam. After studying the map much, much more carefully, I took a completely different route from the one I originally planned and got there in a much more reasonable 45 minutes. It was great strolling among the 19 working windmills that still pump water off the land surrounding them.
This weekend the group had nothing specific planned, but Trent told us the program would pay for travel expenses and entrance to the Kröller-Müller Museum in Hoge Veluwe National Park. It was our choice what day to go, but a few of us thought that the museum was less likely to be crowded on Friday, so we set out earlyish to leave plenty of time for exploration. That turned out to be a good choice, because once we saw how incredible both the park and the museum were, we didn’t want to leave. Continue reading ‘Kröller-Müller Museum’
Trent has kind of a complex about getting lost, probably because he does it like, oh, all the time. Personally, I like getting lost. Today after lecture, I decided to ride around Kralingse Bos, a huge park north of Erasmus University. It can’t even touch Amsterdamse Bos in sheer awesomeness, but it was nice to ride around the lake and be out in the open. When I finally left, I thought I was heading out the same way I came in, but apparently I was mistaken. I got profoundly lost.
I rode around some very industrial areas of Rotterdam for awhile and then around some very rural areas. It was delightful I finally found my way back to Erasmus University, and I was pretty sure I could make my way back to Hotel Baan from there (not completely sure). One of the things I like about getting lost is that I’m forced to examine my surroundings more closely than I usually do, and I often see something wonderful that I would have missed otherwise. Today, I saw a bike that was a little stranger than most, so I rode closer to get a better look. What I saw made me smile for the rest of the day: A newly-wed groom was taking his bride out for a spin on his bike equipped with a big cargo cart. Things like that should happen more often.
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