Lise Stork, PhD candidate at LIACS, was interviewed by Mare about how to smartly digitise the collections of natural history museums.

Anthropologist Bart Barendregt is participating in a new Indonesian study program that focuses entirely on the Indonesian digital society. The Radio 1 NPO program Focus interviewed Barendregt 'live' from Java about his research on social media, Islam and boy bands.

Three enormous maps of China, created during the reign of three different emperors of the Qing dynasty, have now been made available in open access and are downloadable via Leiden University Libraries’ (UBL) Digital Collections. The rich maps are an early example of academic collaboration between the…

Leiden University Libraries (UBL) recently participated in the Pagode-Europeana-China project as an associated partner. As a result, almost two hundred items related to China from the UBL Special Collections are now available via the Europeana website. The UBL was the only library to participate in…

‘Jelena Prokic, university lecturer and researcher at the Leiden University Centre for Digital Humanities, will be preparing students for the challenges and opportunities of the digital world. In September, six modules will start on subjects such as statistics and digitally searching through texts.…

How does online learning strengthen the quality of higher education and what are the barriers to implementing this more broadly? Minister of Education Ingrid van Engelshoven talked about this issue with pioneering lecturers and students from Leiden University, Erasmus University and Delft University…

The ambition to have flexible learning pathways is about creating possibilities to improve the content and form of students’ learning process, and to link learning to students’ needs. Students who have access to a flexible range of learning pathways can align their university career with their own personal…

The Heritage and Postcolonial Studies specialiation has a regional focus on colonial and postcolonial Indonesia, in transnational and comparative perspectives. You will critically study the politics and practices of archives in the context of colonial and postcolonial history, thereby engaging with…

The digitisation of society is a worldwide challenge. Not only are robots increasingly taking over human tasks, they are even beating the world champion at solving the most difficult brainteasers.

In Luganda, the widest spoken minority language in East African country Uganda, the word for photographs is Ebifananyi. However, ebifananyi does not, contrary to the etymology of the word photographs, relate to light writings. Ebifananyi instead means things that look like something else. Ebifananyi…

Hifadhi ya Dijiti ya Ustadh Mau

Digital Archaeology is concerned with digital data for for archaeological research, and the computational methods and tools required to collect, analyse and manage it.

The labour market has seen significant changes in recent decades, not least in terms of greater flexibility and digitisation. Leiden University is keen to prepare students for a working life in which flexibility, resilience and adaptability will be essential qualities. The university’s vision on teaching…

Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University is known for its student-centred teaching and world-leading faculty.

Dutch archaeologists are making three-dimensional virtual reconstructions of archaeological objects lost in the Syrian civil war.

Experimental research

The Faculty of Archaeology

Teaching at Leiden University is closely interwoven with scientific research. Our teaching methods make use of technological innovations, our lecturers share their knowledge with one another and they are constantly alert to possibilities for innovation and depth in their teaching.

Leiden University and China import partner.

The Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS) accepted the request for subsidy to digitise the archive of the archaeological fieldwork at Tell Deir Alla in the eastern Jordan Valley. The subsidy comes from its KDP-program (Small Data Project) and is meant to promote digitisation of important datasets.…

The map application includes information from old and new buildings archaeological projects. This makes it possible to investigate whether water facilities (wells, cisterns) and waste facilities (cesspits, sewers) were the privilege of Leiden’s wealthy elite in the late 16th and 17th centuries or whether…

The fourteen Dutch universities have published a digital magazine in which the researchers explain the Digital Society programme in text and images.

Stefano Bellucci, university lecturer at the Institute for History, has been awarded a grant by the EAP for a pilot project for the preservation and digitisation of the workers’ files of the Takoradi Railways (now part of the Ghana Railways Corporation).

Curators devote a lot of attention to their collections. How is Martijn Storms, curator of maps and atlases at Leiden University Libraries, managing to do this now he is working from home? And how is Silvia Vermetten digitising Eastern manuscripts from home?

Whilst the world is opening up, the teaching will continue in a hybrid form next academic year. During the past year, when all of us were bound to our home offices and computer screens, new forms of education had to be developed – some of which proved to be efficient in preparing the students for their…

The Centre for Innovation (CFI) has a mission to identify and explore transformative trends in a digital world, creating innovative methods, products and solutions for Leiden University and its partners.

Study of human cultures using computational approaches

When you want to analyse big quantities of archaeological data, you run into the issue that searching through excavation reports is extremely time-consuming. If only there existed a search engine specifically focused on querying these reports… But wait, work on an archaeological search engine focused…

Mariken Teeuwen started at the Institute for History as a professor by special appointment of Script Culture of the Middle Ages on 1 March. ‘I’m looking forward to doing research together with students.’

On 4 April 2019, the University of Basel held a conference on the subject of digitisation in academic teaching.

Leiden University and the University of Amsterdam, together with Heritage Leiden and Region, are developing a map application of historical Leiden.

An international consortium of research institutes, universities and non-academic partners in six European countries has been awarded with a research grant from the Department for Research and Innovation of the European Commission in June 2018. MIDA is coordinated by the ‘Centre National de la Recherche…

The treasure houses of Leiden's University Library and Naturalis house wonderful historical collections with dried plants and botanical drawings. Professor by Special Appointment Tinde van Andel will be studying these collections. Inaugural lecture 6 January.

The ability to create objects and structures with our hands has been essential to human development. This ability is something modern society is at risk of losing. Leiden archaeologists gather knowledge about ancient processes of ‘making and creating’ over the centuries, knowledge that helps our current…

A number of developments within and outside the University make it necessary to treat the issue of innovation with greater urgency. An overview of these developments is given below.

Archiving Medieval and Post-Medieval Archaeological Fieldwork Data from the Eastern Mediterranean (600-2000)

Using artificial intelligence is more complicated for the government than for companies. Bram Klievink, Professor of Public Administration, aims to identify the problems and find solutions.

The Book and Digital Media Studies programme provides you with in-depth knowledge of the history of the book (manuscript and print) and theories and practices within the field of publishing and digital textual media. You will graduate with detailed knowledge of the most relevant issues and important…

On 28 October, Leiden University received the first Javanese Culture Prize from Universitas Sebelas Maret in Solo, Indonesia. The jury praised Leiden University’s extensive collection of Indonesian and Javanese manuscripts.

Researchers from more than 30 countries have been discussing the changes in reading through digitization in the European research network E-READ. Adriaan van der Weel, Senior University Lecturer, spoke about the network’s achievements in the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

On 26 and 27 January 2017, the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society will be hosting an international graduate conference entitled ‘Landscape: Interpretations, Relations, and Representations’. A selection of researchers and artists will be invited to participate in panels, in which their…

The Centre for Digital Scholarship of Leiden University Libraries (UBL) and the Leiden Centre for Digital Humanities would like to invite you to the symposium on Tools Criticism on Thursday 21 November, from 10.00-18.00. The symposium will be held in the Vossius room of the University Library at Witte…

Due to the unrest in the Middle East, many ancient Syrian manuscripts are no longer available or have even been destroyed. Professor of Old Testament Bas ter Haar Romeny received 77 microfilms of Syrian manuscripts, enabling him and his PhD students to research these ‘lost’ manuscripts.

Korea specialist Koen De Ceuster has combined 1200 posters from North Korea in one database. He believes the posters are extremely valuable for researchers who want to make a more in-depth study of this closed country. The database will be launched on 15 June in Leiden.

Wessel Kraaij has been appointed Professor of Applied Data Analytics with effect from 1 March 2016. Kraaij will use new methods to analyse big data sets. He intends to use data from various data-intensive research fields to test these methods in practice.

The oldest paleoanthropological archive in the world, the Eugène Dubois archive, was presented to Naturalis Biodiversity Center on 13 January. Leiden professor, Jan Slikkerveer, who was the owner of the archive and spent years researching it, handed it over to Naturalis Director, Edwin van Huis, under…

Seminar 12th of April