Digital Humanities and Urban Climate proposals win NLeSC-Lorentz Workshop competition

20 Jul 2016 - 3 min

This year the Netherlands eScience Center and the Lorentz Center initiated a new competition in which researchers could win a leading-edge workshop on the application of digitally enhanced research. The workshop topic should bring together researchers from the academic scientific community with those from the public/private sector.

Because of the high quality of proposals received, we have decided to have a grand opening of this new program and start out with two winners. We are very pleased that we can begin this program with such high quality and interesting workshops!

The workshops will take place at Lorentz Center@Snellius, Leiden, The Netherlands. The funding of these workshops is made possible by the Netherlands eScience Center, Leiden University and several Dutch funding agencies (NWO-divisions, FOM and STW), anticipating the benefit of the workshops to the Dutch research community.

For more information, please contact Arjen Doelman, Director Lorentz Center or Wilco Hazeleger, Director Netherlands eScience Center.

Winners of the first competition

Visualizing Digital Humanities
Titia van der Werf (Senior Program Officer OCLC), Prof. dr. Bettina Speckmann (Eindhoven University of Technology), Prof. dr. Arianna Betti (University of Amsterdam)

Libraries provide online access to millions and millions of bibliographic records and digitized texts. Scholars in the field of Digital Humanities analyze these records and texts using computational tools. The field of Visual Analytics provides cutting-edge, interactive visual representations, allowing users to extract meaning from large datasets.

This workshop brings together experts from the fields of Geometric Algorithms, Visual Analytics, the Library Sector, and the field of Digital Humanities, in order to develop state-of-the-art visual techniques for librarians and scholars in the humanities. We will identify and describe new areas of application for researchers working in Visual Analytics and formulate objectives and use cases that will result in visualizations satisfying the needs of librarians and humanities scholars.

eWUDAPT: Bringing eScience to Urban Climate Mapping and Modelling
Prof. Dr. Bert Holtslag, Dr. Gert-Jan Steeneveld, Dr. Natalie Theeuwes (Wageningen University)

The world is rapidly urbanizing, requiring dedicated management to keep cities and their surroundings livable, healthy and productive. Urban morphology alters the local environment, and therefore impacts urban weather and climate. Both for long term planning of sustainable cities to be prepared for future climate change and short term urban energy demand planning, representation of the urban morphology in numerical atmospheric models is essential and critical. However, we are still hampered by data of sufficient quality.

This workshop will aims to enhance the WUDAPT (World Urban Database and Access Portal Tools) by eScience methods and stakeholder participation in finding innovative ways of digitizing and analyzing relevant information for urban weather and climate. In addition, results of the eWUDAPT effort are explored to improve urban energy demand planning in the private energy sector (like ENECO) as well as management of environmental quality.