Short Intro

I am a full research professor in the department of literature at the University of Antwerp in Belgium. I work on computational models of human culture. The persistence of cultural information over long stretches of time is my key research topic at the moment. In a new framework that we call Cultural Ecology, we import empirical methods from ecology and biostatistics to provide innovative quantitative models of cultural change and survival, in particular in the domain of literature. My expertise lies with the application of machine learning, natural language processing and statistics for the analysis of noisy, historic data. I enjoy research in computational text analysis, in particular for premodern literature. Much of my work can be situated in the Computational Humanities, an international community in which scholars from the conventional Humanities (linguistics, literary studies, history, ...) explore how digital methods and computation can support, enhance and transform existings practices in research and teaching. In the past, I have taught various courses and workshops on Digital Text Analysis, Corpus and Computational Linguistics, Programming for the Humanities and medieval philology. I code in Python, tweet in English, and live in Brussels.