UBL Scaliger Institute Elsevier Fellowship for Digital Scholarship

Fellowship to provide scholars with the opportunity to conduct research on the digital collections of Leiden University Libraries, and to collaborate with the innovative Centre for Digital Scholarship (CDS) at Leiden University.

The Universiteitsbibliotheek Leiden (UBL – Leiden University Libraries) is a library founded in 1575 in Leiden, Netherlands. UBL includes the University Library, the libraries of Social and Behavioural Sciences, Law, Archaeology, Mathematics and Natural Sciences, the Asian Library, the NINO Library and the Wijnhaven Library in The Hague. The Academic Historical Museum is part of UBL. Furthermore, UBL has two offices abroad, one in Jakarta (Indonesia) and one in Rabat (Morocco).

The UBL Scaliger Institute, founded in 2000, aims to stimulate and facilitate the use of the special collections of UBL in both teaching and research. The institute provides various fellowships to junior and senior scholars from the Netherlands and elsewhere.

The Elsevier Fellowship for Digital Scholarship is sponsored by the Dutch academic publishing company Elsevier. Within the framework of the fellowship, fellows are provided with the opportunity to conduct research on the digital collections at Leiden University Libraries and to collaborate with the innovative Centre for Digital Scholarship (CDS) at the University, enabling them to enrich their research using methods associated with data science and the digital humanities. 

The proposed research preferably, but not exclusively, addresses the following areas:

• Use of machine learning algorithms to enhance digital access to UBL’s collections.
• The computational analysis of visual information within digital images.
• Applications of Social Network analysis.
• Applications of Geographic Information Systems (GIS).
• Research based on manuscripts dispersed over different locations.
• The enrichment of the digital collections of the UBL through annotations, transcriptions and transliterations.
• Using the digital collections in research and education through the development of dynamic learning routes.
• Enriching the digital collections through semantic enrichments and connections to term networks.
• Text & data mining based on the textual collections of the UBL, particularly for non-Western languages and textual files with moderate to poor OCR quality.