text corpus

Nederlab, online laboratory for humanities research on Dutch text collections

Nederlab is a user-friendly and tool-enriched open access web interface that aims at containing all digitized texts relevant for the Dutch national heritage and the history of Dutch language and culture (c. 800 - present).

The Nederlab project aims to bring together all digitized texts relevant to Dutch national heritage, the history of Dutch language and culture (c. 800 -present) in one user-friendly and tool-enriched open access web interface, allowing scholars to simultaneously search and analyze data from texts spanning the full recorded history of the Netherlands, its language and culture. The project builds on various initiatives: for corpora Nederlab collaborates with the scientific libraries and institutions, for infrastructure with CLARIN (and CLARIAH), for tools with eHumanities programmes such as Catch, IMPACT and CLARIN (TICCL, frog).

Nederlab allows researchers to search and refine its content on basis of metadata, text and several layers of annotations for this text, such as lemmata, part-of-speech tags, named entities or syntactic annotations. These enrichments are added during a preprocessing stage that also applies automatic spelling normalization. Search results can of course be inspected one-by-one, via lists or keyword-in-context concordances, but also in several aggregated forms. For example, results can simultaneously be grouped on basis of publication date and genre and then displayed as visualisations or exported. Or they can be presented as collocations. Statistics about the result set are available as well, as are frequency lists over any subcollection. Search results can be stored as virtual collections in the researcher’s personal workspace. A range of tools will be available in this workspace to analyse the collections or to compare them to each other.

The first version of Nederlab was launched in early 2015, it’ll be expanded until the end of 2017.