About Huygens Institute

Huygens Institute for History and Culture of the Netherlands

The Huygens Institute is the national institute for research on history and culture of the Netherlands. We study historical sources and literary texts in innovative ways in an international perspective. We pay special attention to voices hitherto little heard in order to do more justice to the multifaceted history and culture of the Netherlands.

We conduct our research in collaboration with partners at home and abroad. In order to jointly arrive at new insights, it is necessary that people have access to our historical sources not only in the Netherlands, but worldwide. The Huygens Institute has therefore also set itself the goal of making and keeping sources digitally accessible.

Both in our research and in making sources accessible, we use innovative methods and techniques (often supported by AI, such as Handwritten Text Recognition software, computational text analysis and comparison) and set new standards for linked open data. To this end, we bring together experts from different fields of knowledge, for example from the humanities, social sciences, computational linguistics and computer science.

Our international and interdisciplinary cooperation enables the Huygens Institute to be a leading and modern knowledge institute for Dutch history and culture for humanities and social scientists at home and abroad.

Currently, the institute consists of six research groups. They focus respectively on political culture and history, life courses, computational literature, knowledge and art practices, digital editions and the relations between Dutch culture and identity. Institute-wide themes are knowledge networks, biographical data, and dealing with climate, weather and energy.

Our data managers play a crucial role in making resources accessible by providing support to data-intensive research projects; managing datasets and online resources; and overseeing the harmonization, interoperability, and usability of data sets and digital tools.

Together, we develop tools to map and analyse historical and cultural data. Among other things, the Huygens Institute unlocks the resolutions of the States General and large parts of the archives of the VOC (Dutch East India Company) It also makes accessible the correspondence of prominent individuals, such as Johan de Witt and the wives of the stadholders, and artists, such as Piet Mondrian and Vincent van Gogh.

More information about the Huygens Institute, among others the mission, vision and strategy, can be found here.

Last but not least the institute also occupies a key position in the development of CLARIAH, a sustainable research infrastructure for the humanities and social sciences. In this, the Digital Infrastructure Department of the KNAW Humanities Cluster plays an important role.

The Huygens Institute established the KNAW Humanities Cluster in 2016 together with the Meertens Institute and the International Institute of Social History.

History of the institute

The history of the institute dates back to 1902. The Dutch government appointed a committee to publish historical sources: the Advisory Committee for National Historical Publications (Commissie van Advies voor ‘s Rijks Geschiedkundige Publicatiën, RGP). Since 1910, the commission was supported by its own bureau. Eventually, this bureau became part of the Dutch Research Council (NWO) in 1989 as the Institute for History of the Netherlands (ING).

In 1992, the Bureau Basisvoorziening Tekstedities merged with a number of long-standing KNAW commissions and mini-institutes and a NWO project into the Constantijn Huygens Institute, an institute for text editions and intellectual history. In 2005, the department of Dutch Studies of the defunct Netherlands Institute for Scientific Information Services (NIWI) was added to the institute and it changed its name to Huygens Institute.

In 2011, the ING and the Huygens Institute merged to form the Huygens ING. Between 2011 and 2016, the institute was located in the building of the Royal Library in The Hague. Since October 2016, the institute has been housed in the Spinhuis in Amsterdam. From the summer of 2022, the institute continued under the full name Huygens Institute for History and Culture of the Netherlands, in short Huygens Institute.

Research Committee

The research committee is a KNAW-appointed committee that advises both the institute’s management and the KNAW Board of Directors. Currently, the science committee consists of the following members: