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.

Leiden University Libraries and Brill publishing house have digitised one of the University's top collections. The collection is now available as an online publication: Codices Vossiani Latini Online.

The unique collection of Panji manuscripts held by Leiden University Libraries (UBL) will be digitised thanks to support from the public. A sum of 9,871 Euros was raised through crowdfunding to help fund the digitisation. We wish to express our warm thanks to all our donors for their contributions.

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 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 order to achieve a smooth interface between society and technology, care has to be taken with integrating…

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…

Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden 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.

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

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.

The Faculty of Archaeology

Experimental research

Study of human cultures using computational approaches

The unique collection of more than 250 ancient tales revolving around the mythical Javanese Prince Panji, which is curated by Leiden University Libraries (UBL), has been acknowledged as world heritage by UNESCO. The UBL is grateful to UNESCO for this exceptionally prestigious award.

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.…

Prince Panji is the title character in the popular Panji tales from Java. These stories are, without fail, about a prince and a princess, about love and adventure. They can be rather complex, featuring name changes, masquerades, incarnations and transformations, and may take the form of text or thea…

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?

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…

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.

With the help of the public, almost 7,000 digitised maps of the Dutch East Indies have recently become accessible for the public. The University Library is organising a festive get-together on 17 November to thank the volunteers.

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.

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 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.

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…

During the first lockdown all the lab work for biology students suddenly came to a standstill. Bachelor’s student Daan van Tol was forced to change his research plans and decided to map out the evolutionary history of an important type of enzyme. ‘By gathering together all this information, I hope…

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

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.

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…

After eight years, Professor Erik Kwakkel is exchanging Leiden University for the University of British Columbia, where he will become Professor of History of the Book from 1 August.

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.

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…

Follow the setting up of the Asian Library, a new center of expertise at Leiden University.

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.

Seminar 12th of April

How were ideas about politics and society distributed in ancient China? Hilde De Weerdt, Professor of Chinese History, investigates this using new digital methods. We speak with her about networks, big data and digital humanities.

The climate crisis, the return of TB and the digitisation of cultural heritage. The Netherlands and Indonesia face many of the same challenges. A visit by a delegation from Leiden University to Indonesia at the end of June highlighted the benefits of cooperation.

The world is becoming increasingly digitised, and the information one has easy access to is often rather overwhelming. In particular, the accumulative nature of the archaeological practice has resulted in huge quantities of data being produced. But how to prevent these from becoming dust-collectors…

War and terrorism overshadow interest in the pre-Islamic heritage of the Arabic peninsula. The new Leiden Centre for the Study of Ancient Arabia aims to make the general public more aware of the ancient history of this region.