Nederlab - Laboratory for research on the patterns of change in the Dutch language and culture

The aim of this project is to bring together all digitized texts relevant to our national heritage, the history of Dutch language and culture (c. 800 - present) in one user-friendly and tool-enriched open access web interface, allowing scholars to simultaneously search and analyse data from texts spanning the full recorded history of the Netherlands, its language and culture. Language and culture are inherently dynamic phenomena. Scholars in the humanities - linguists, literary scholars, historians - try to understand processes of change and variation and to uncover their internal and external causes. Large quantities of data are needed to answer the research questions relevant to these fields of study. Until now, this research has necessarily consisted of case studies of limited scope, covering relatively short time periods and single disciplines. As more Dutch historical texts become available in digitized form, new research questions emerge, and systematic research into the interaction of changes in culture, society, literature and language across the full history is becoming feasible. The hypothesis is that changes in language and culture - both of them expressions of human cognition - are related, and that investigating these relationships will further our understanding of them. This research will yield novel and cross-disciplinary insights in fundamental theoretical problems such as the nature-nurture debate, the discussion on cultural identity and cultural integration, the emergence of canons, and the diffusion of knowledge, culture and language. As yet, however, no comprehensive research corpus has been established, mainly for practical reasons. The available diachronic corpora are housed in different places, with different metadata, and cannot be searched simultaneously. Advanced software tools necessary for the analysis of the texts are available, but are in most cases specific to a particular goal rather than generally applicable. The potential of the available technological means and scientific standards of verifiability and replicability is far from being exploited. A group of experts in diachronic research, corpus and infrastructure construction, search technologies and tool development jointly submit this application for the foundation of Nederlab. Nederlab offers a user-friendly web interface enabling a distributed search of available diachronic corpora, at text and metadata level, which will lead to better access to existing corpora, as well as quality improvement and standardization of data and metadata. The project builds on various initiatives: for corpora Nederlab collaborates with the scientific libraries and institutions, for infrastructure with CLARIN, DARIAH (and potentially CLARIAH), for tools with eHumanities programmes such as Catch and IMPACT. Nederlab has the added value of creating a user-friendly infrastructure for researchers, which will promote cooperation and synergy as well as the formulaton of new, often interdisciplinary, research questions. During the project a great deal of attention will be paid to the dissemination of information; the infrastructure will be set up in close consultation with the research community, and will be tested in concrete research pilots.