Iris Steenhout

• PhD Criminology - MS Computer Sciences - MA Criminology
• lector at Vrije Universiteit Brussel

During my PHD trajectory in criminology I was able to experiment with digital humanities throughout my work. Being a computer scientist as well, I was even able to develop some new methods myself. While there are quite some tools available, much more is possible here.

However, in my experience knowledge on digital methods is often lacking in a lot of disciplines (I'm going on interest I've gotten out of different fields on the topic). While there are very good initiatives in the Netherlands, France and Italy, I have the impression that digital humanities are highly undervalued in Belgium (with the exception of some specific disciplines, like history & linguistics). Nevertheless, the potential is enormous and I'm convinced that this neglect is mostly because scholars are unfamiliar with this type of methods.

Out of this came the idea to inventorize what is currently happening in the field, especially in Belgium, across discipline boundaries and out of this knowledge, I'd like to set up an online collaboration platform with a group of interested people to start with, including highly accessible MOOCs, where expertise can be shared, and existing methods can be bundled to spread knowledge especially for new scholars, but certainly to get established scientists acquainted with these methods and possibilities as well.

If you are interested to join, please do not hesitate to contact me. If you're struggling with something, feel free to join in as well. There's a chance someone already stumbled over your issue before. And if not, it might lead to interesting tools to develop for future researchers.

PS: the Brussels part is a 'soft' requirement ;-).

Interesting starting points for new scholars can be https://onderwijsaanbod.kuleuven.be/opleidingen/e/CQ_52330579.htm#activetab=diploma_omschrijving

https://www.ghentcdh.ugent.be/ (limited to history, geography, cultural studies, linguistics)

I'm hoping for someone familiar with the works of Luhmann to help me out here. If we understand society as communication, like Luhmann explains in his social systems theory (and not humans, nature, etc.), then - hypothetically - if I was the only person to witness an earthquake, but do not communicate about it, then this eartquake is at no point part of society, correct?

This does not exclude the consequences of the eartquake (ecological, economical, etc.) to enter society at a later time because these are noticed by others -or even myself- and possibly communicated (maybe even leading to the conclusion there must have been an earthquake, and as such let the earthquake enter society at a later time). But only is these are - again - communicated on, these become relevant for society.

Am I correct to interpret Luhmann as such?

I'm trying to figure out how these work, but so far no luck. I understand you need an index file (obviously), and a text file indicating the dates per file. That's all present and the times are found and shown in the WordSmith Tools file list overview, so they are retrieved. However, when i ask to calculates the time lines for specific words ...nothing happens. What am I missing?

I'm having +4000 periods and corresponding measurement for that period. I'd like to create a time series, but also need to add data for some missing periods. I know the corresponding value is 0 in that case.

Is there an efficient way to add these missing cases to SPSS? And preferably only using SPSS? With other tools I can manage, but can't imagine there's no feature in SPSS that handles this (without the need to import/export to something else).

Eg. I have:

2006/01/01 - 12

2006/01/02 - 4

2006/01/04 - 10

Where I need:

Date - Count

2006/01/01 - 12

2006/01/02 - 4

2006/01/04 - 10

I wonder if there has been research that mentions some specific terms that trigger people to open a newsitem on a news site. Any good leads on research that covers this?