• Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage
• Open Access close
• Research data close
• Other research products close
• NARCIS close

In north-western Europe, the Rhine, Meuse and Scheldt rivers have created a large river delta over the past 3 million years. Geological phenomena in the Scheldt region in north-western Belgium and in the southern Netherlands testify from a highly dynamic landscape, showing a range from very old (50 MY) to very young (recent) geological processes. The great diversity in geological processes and resulting landscapes is unprecedented on a global scale and has had its impact on the region’s cultural and economic history, shaping today’s reality in the global polycrisis. However, the area is usually observed by people as a flat and featureless type of terrain, although sometimes, unexpected elevation differences and sharp contrasts in landscapes occur alternating with omnipresent waterways. Therefore, here, the seven most conspicuous landforms are reviewed and presented in conjunction with the geological history of the area, including the typical lowland theme of the human battle against water. This study aims to (a) reconstruct the Tertiary and Quaternary to Holocene Dutch–Flemish Schelde Delta history, (b) review a cultural history that evolves into the present of the Anthropocene, and (c) project the desired future for sustainable landscapes in the aspiring UNESCO Global Geopark Schelde Delta between plural landscape management scenarios of Revitalised Land- and Waterscape and Improved Biodiversity.

Past work in natural language processing interpretability focused mainly on popular classification tasks while largely overlooking generation settings, partly due to a lack of dedicated tools. In this work, we introduce Inseq, a Python library to democratize access to interpretability analyses of sequence generation models. Inseq enables intuitive and optimized extraction of models' internal information and feature importance scores for popular decoder-only and encoder-decoder Transformers architectures. We showcase its potential by adopting it to highlight gender biases in machine translation models and locate factual knowledge inside GPT-2. Thanks to its extensible interface supporting cutting-edge techniques such as contrastive feature attribution, Inseq can drive future advances in explainable natural language generation, centralizing good practices and enabling fair and reproducible model evaluations.

In this blog post, we reflect on the use of the Media Suite for multimodal storytelling practices in the international classroom. The CLARIAH Media Suite combines Dutch media data collections and makes audiovisual material from Dutch audiovisual collections more accessible for higher education (CLARIAH Media Suite - What is the CLARIAH Media Suite?, n.d.). From October 2021 until January 2022, we explored the use of the Media Suite together with a multicultural, interdisciplinary group of MA students with a background in media creation and innovation at the University of Groningen. The students used content from audiovisual collections in the Media Suite for creative storytelling practices. In this subject tutorial, we provide insights on how the Media Suite can be implemented for multimodal storytelling usage in the international classroom. Project: Making Multimodal Storytelling Experiences with Cultural Heritage Materials in the International Classroom (MAKE) - Media Suite Teaching Fellowship CLARIAH-PLUS (2019-2023) PI/Principal Investigator: dr. Berber Hagedoorn, Assistant Professor Media Studies & Audiovisual Culture (RUG), b.hagedoorn@rug.nl Project Period: October 1, 2021 to 1 July 2022

This is part 4 of the Rchon statistics course. It continues the basics of statistical testing in R. In this tutorial, we will treat the following statistical testing methods: Mann-Whitney test Kruskal-Wallis test Kolmogorov-Smirnov test Follow the instructions in Instructions Tutorial 4.pdf to start the tutorial. This course was originally created for Archon Research School of Archaeology by Philip Verhagen (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) and Bjørn P. Bartholdy (University of Leiden), and consists of an instruction, a tutorial, a test and two datafiles. All content is CC BY-NC-SA: it can be freely distributed and modified under the condition of proper attribution and non-commercial use. How to cite: Verhagen, P. & B.P. Bartholdy, 2022. "Rchon statistics course, part 3". Amsterdam, ARCHON Research School of Archaeology. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7458108

This is part 3 of the Rchon statistics course. It continues the basics of statistical testing in R. In this tutorial, we will treat the following statistical testing methods: chi square test Fisher's exact test Follow the instructions in Instructions Tutorial 3.pdf to start the tutorial. This course was originally created for Archon Research School of Archaeology by Philip Verhagen (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) and Bjørn P. Bartholdy (University of Leiden), and consists of an instruction, a tutorial, a test and two datafiles. All content is CC BY-NC-SA: it can be freely distributed and modified under the condition of proper attribution and non-commercial use. How to cite: Verhagen, P. & B.P. Bartholdy, 2022. "Rchon statistics course, part 3". Amsterdam, ARCHON Research School of Archaeology. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7457698

This final ARIADNEplus project report on Policies and Good Practices for FAIR Archaeological Data Management describes how focused and dedicated support has established structured policies and strategies for the creation of archaeological data of high quality. A standardised and online tool offers a Data Management Plan for archaeologists which helps researchers to conduct their research following standard quality criteria. Researchers can save a lot of time when preparing a Data Management Plan, since a motivation is only required when deviating from the standard reply, which the Domain Protocol for Archaeological Data Management offers as pre-formulated statements. A related Guide for Archaeological Data Management Planning helps users in their work to find good practices in archaeological data management.

Residue analysis is an established area of expertise focused on detecting traces of substances found on the surface of objects. It is routinely employed in forensic casework and increasingly incorporated into archaeological investigations.In archaeology, sampling and data interpretation sometimes lacked strict standards, resulting in incorrect residue classifications. In particular, molecular signals of salts of fatty acids identified by FTIR have been, at times, interpreted as evidence for adipocere, a substance formed as a consequence of adipose tissues' degradation.This article reviews and discusses the possibilities and limitations of the analytical protocols used in residue analysis in archaeology. The focus is on three main points: (1) reviewing the decomposition processes and the chemical components of adipocere; (2) highlighting potential misidentifications of adipocere while, at the same time, addressing issues related to residue preservation and contamination; and (3) proposing new research avenues to identify adipocere on archaeological objects.(c) 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

At the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, we have set out to explore the strengths and limitations of replication studies in the humanities in practice. We are doing so by replicating two original studies: one in the field of art history, the other in the field of history of science and religion. In this blog, we outline the design, purposes, and aims of these projects and explore some of the challenges.