Arjan van Dalfsen MA

PhD candidate

Area(s) of interest: Digital Humanities, Dutch History, History & Philosophy of Science and Technology, Animal History

Cohort/Start PhD: 2022-2023

Mining the Dutch Attitude towards Animals and Plants (1500-2000)
Utrecht University

Supervisors: Prof. dr. Els Stronks, Dr. Ayoub Bagheri, Dr. Folgert Karsdorp
Duration of your appointment: from 1-1-2023 until 12-31-2026

This project addresses the topic of the human attitude towards animals and plants. We aim to establish a better understanding of the history of both the knowledge about animals/plants and the cultural representation of animals/plants in the Netherlands, between 1550 and 2000. We do this by applying computational methods, most notably Large Language Models (LLM), to several corpora of historic, Dutch texts.