I’m a postdoctoral researcher on the Agora project at the VU University. In the Agora project, we try to facilitate and assess the impact of digitally mediated public history. We will do this by developing a web platform where users can place museum objects from the Rijksmuseum and the Dutch Institute for Sound and Vision into a historical context. Among other things, the Agora platform will allow end-users to compile personal narratives from the objects. I am particularly interested in the modelling of historical events and how these events can be linked to the museum objects from different user perspectives.

In January 2012, the KNAW Student Assistant Project “Networking for Business” started. This is a collaboration with the Faculty of Social Sciences where we try to analyse the online networks of ethnic Chinese businesses in Southeast Asia to test the ‘institutionalist’ theory that Chinese businesses are successful because they have such tight-knit networks.  

During my Ph.D. project I worked on the MITCH project at Tilburg University. My project was concerned with improving data quality and advanced knowledge presentation through (sometimes automatically induced) ontologies. To see what else I’ve been up to before and during my Ph.D. project you can have a look at my CV or my publications. My Ph.D. thesis can be found here.