Joris van Zundert

Biography

Dr. Joris J. van Zundert (1972) is a senior researcher and developer in humanities computing in the department of literary studies and the Digital Humanities Lab at the Huygens Institute. His research focuses on computational algorithms to analyze literary and historical texts, and on aspects of humanities information and data modeling. His PhD research in the field of Science and Technology Studies focused on methodological effects of the interaction between software engineers and humanities scholars. He was awarded the title of doctor “cum laude” (with honors) on the basis of his dissertation Scholarship in Interaction in 2022. His computational analytic work focuses on the correlation between text immanent features of texts and sociological processes around the concept of literature. He is also involved in developing computational approaches to stemmatology, narratology, and scholarly editions.

Joris van Zundert was attracted to the Huygens Institute in 2005 to form a digital humanities research and development group. Subsequently he headed the ‘Digital Humanities Software R&D Team’ from 2006 until 2009. Between 2009 and 2012 he was the appointed project manager of the Royal Academy’s Alphalab project—a cooperative project by six Royal Academy institutes to determine the requirements of a digital infrastructure for humanities and to explore and test drive the possibilities of computational humanities for that field. In 2007 he also became Chair of the European funded Interedition project, which grew into a European/US initiative to foster interoperability and collaboration in tool development for digital textual scholarship. In 2012 he was added to the management team of the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands and became responsible for the 3 year Methodology research programme aimed at integrating suitable digital tools and techniques into the humanities methodological approaches. Since 2016 he is full senior researcher in the department of Literary Studies of the same institute.

Joris van Zundert studied Dutch literature and linguistics at the University of Utrecht (The Netherlands) and specialized in historical literature. He graduated on the adaptation of the Dutch medieval romance or fable Of Reynaert the Fox for an animation screenplay. (On Reynaert see also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reynard). In a commercial venture he produced several successful digital publications and corporate web sites. He was employed as coordinator of IT operations at WeTeN, a Dutch governmental supported foundation for the popularization of science. He moved on to become an expert of IT applications in the humanities at the department of history of the meanwhile dissolved Dutch Institute for Scientific Information Technology Services (NIWI – KNAW). Subsequently he was employed as scholar and IT expert at the department of Dutch Literature and Linguistics at the same institute.