Search

The Database of the Southern Dutch Dialects (DSDD) aims to aggregate and standardise three existing comprehensive lexicographic dialect databases of the Flemish, Brabantic and Limburgian dialects into one integrated dataset (Van Keymeulen, et al., 2019; Van Hout, et al., 2018, De Vriend, et al., 2006). In 2016, the Research Foundation Flanders funded a medium-scale research infrastructure project, the Database of Southern Dutch Dialects (DSDD)[1], which ran from 2017 until 2020 and resulted in a harmonised dataset of concepts (Van den Heuvel, et al., 2016), a user-friendly search engine and a geo-visualisation tool. The application backend provides an Application Programming Interface (API) which will be further developed and made available to researchers to export subsets of the data for analysis using existing digital research tools. At the previous DH Benelux conferences the project team introduced the project (2017), explored the cartographic tools (2018) and demonstrated the prototype (2019). Following the launch of the DSDD platform in 2020, the team will now present the importance of the interdisciplinary approach, the final results of the project, as well as future directions beyond the project lifetime.

Digital cultural heritage collections in libraries, archives, and museums are increasingly being used for digital humanities research. However, traditional ways of providing access to such collections, for example through digital library interfaces, are less than ideal for researchers who are looking to build datasets around specific research questions. Inspired by the ‘Collections as Data’ movement as an approach for cultural heritage institutions to prepare their digital 1 collections for analysis using digital methods, KBR, the Royal Library of Belgium, has embarked on a 24 month project called DATA-KBR-BE (2020-2022) to facilitate data-level access to its 2 digitised and born-digital collections for digital humanities research. This paper will: a) introduce the concept of ‘Collections as Data’ while exploring the opportunities and challenges for cultural heritage institutions; b) outline the DATA-KBR-BE project and the methodology for piloting ‘Collections as Data’ at KBR; and c) present the preliminary results of initial experiments to extract thematic datasets in support of digital humanities research scenarios as a first step towards designing a sustainable data extraction workflow for KBR.