Humanities research depends on historical sources that archives have preserved, in some cases for centuries. Archives do everything they can to make those sources available online, but their capacity to do so is limited. My work on infrastructure adds to that effort — helping close the gap between what archives hold and what research can actually reach.
Project lead, CLARIAH's linked data ecosystem
The linked-data ecosystem behind CLARIAH’s structured historical data — datasets, the tools to publish and query them, and the stories built on top of them.
What it is
dataLegend is CLARIAH’s ecosystem for everything linked data: a triplestore (Druid) hosting historical socio-economic datasets as RDF, tools to create and publish Linked Open Data, grlc for turning stored SPARQL queries into shareable REST APIs, and Data Stories — narrative pages built directly on top of live linked datasets rather than static exports. In CLARIAH-NL’s newer projects, SSHOC-NL and Macroscope, we continue building on this ecosystem: a knowledge graph of CLARIAH tooling connected to the SSHOC Open Marketplace, and an open version of Data Stories.
rev 1598be5 ·
updated 26 Jul 2026
· “Rewrite Structured Datahub entry as dataLegend”
Dutch National Coordinator; chair, National Coordinators' Forum
DARIAH is the European research infrastructure for the arts and humanities — a network connecting national digital-humanities infrastructures like CLARIAH across some twenty member countries.
What it is
As the Dutch National Coordinator, I represent the Netherlands’ digital-humanities infrastructure (CLARIAH) within DARIAH-EU, and chair the forum where national coordinators from across DARIAH’s member countries coordinate policy, tooling, and shared services. That work spans everything from how national infrastructures interoperate technically to how the European Research Area’s ERICs (European Research Infrastructure Consortia) and national stakeholders coordinate to strengthen the social sciences and humanities collectively.
rev ed9f47a ·
updated 26 Jul 2026
· “Populate site with real content and generate CV”
Co-author, HISCAM; maintainer, HISCO; convener of vocabulary work in CLARIAH
Vocabularies and classifications that let historical data — occupations, places, people — be compared across archives, languages, and eras.
What it is
I co-authored HISCAM, the continuous social-stratification scale built from occupational co-occurrence, and I maintain the HISCO occupational classification files — including publishing them as Linked Open Data so they can be queried alongside other historical datasets rather than passed around as static lookup tables. Beyond HISCO, I support and contribute to other vocabularies for historical sources: NLGIS, which standardizes historical Dutch administrative geography, and more recently Persons in Context, a model for representing historical person records as linked data. Within CLARIAH, I’ve been instrumental in setting up work on vocabularies more broadly, including a recommender tool — my contribution there is less about building the tools myself and more about convening the people who do.
rev ed9f47a ·
updated 26 Jul 2026
· “Populate site with real content and generate CV”