Team

Directors

Christophe Verbruggen

Prof. dr. Christophe Verbruggen is director of the Ghent Centre for Digital humanities and associate professor at the research unit Social History since 1750. He is also a member of the Institute of Public History and the Centre for the History of Science at Ghent University. He directs DARIAH-VL/ [...] Read full biography

Codirectors

Els Lefever

Prof. dr. Els Lefever is co-director of the Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities and an assistant professor at the LT3 language and translation technology team at Ghent University. She has a master in Linguistics and Literature (Romance languages) and holds a PhD in computer science from Ghent University on ParaSense: Parallel Corpora for Word Sense Disambiguation (2012). She started her career as a computational linguist at the R&D-department of Lernout & Hauspie [...] Read full biography

Gunther Martens

Prof. dr. Gunther Martens is co-director of the Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities and Research Professor of German Literature and a member of the Literature Department at Ghent University. He has a Master in "Germanic Languages" (Ghent University, 1998) and a Master in Literary Studies (Antwerp University, 1999). In the period 2006-2010 he was Professor of Literary Theory at the Free University of Brussels and Professor of German Literature at  [...] Read full biography

Coordinators

Sally Chambers

Sally Chambers is Digital Humanities Research Coordinator at the Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities. She is the first point of contact for researchers who are interested in using digital tools, methods and collections in their research. Sally provides advice and guidance on funding proposals with a digital component and on digital project management. She is the day-to-day coordinator of Belgian participation in DARIAH, the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and [...] Read full biography

Collaborators (technical background)

Hans Blomme

Hans Blomme is master in History (2010) and has been working for the GhentCDH since 2012. He maintained the Virtual Research Environment of TIC Collaborative and contributed to the development and use of analytical tools. He developed skills and knowledge of database systems and content management systems for historical research. Since 2013 he has been working as the Department of History’s policy officer “Historical cartography and historical data processing”. Next to [...] Read full biography

Pieterjan De Potter

Pieterjan De Potter is an application developer at the Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities. He joined GhentCDH in 2017 and his current focus is  the development of collaborative databases. Pieterjan has a Master of  Science in Computer Science Engineering (Ghent University, 2008). He has  a research background in semantic web technologies and has a wide  practical experience in web application development.

Frederic Lamsens

Frederic Lamsens is an application developer at GhentCDH. He joined the team in 2019, after working for 20 years at the IT department of the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy where he developed web applications for research projects and faculty services. Frederic has a Master of Science in Computer Science (Ghent University, 1999).

Frederic is involved in the following projects: 

Alec Van den broeck

Alec Van den broeck is a PhD student at IDLab and GhentCDH, currently working on the VKC Enriched project. Alec has a Master of Science in Computer Science with a major in Artificial Intelligence (Ghent University, 2020). His main interest is the application of computer vision techniques to annotate images and videos with metadata to facilitate and enrich the exploration of collections.

Collaborators (humanities background)

Julie Birkholz

Dr. Julie M. Birkholz is Assistant Professor Digital Humanities at UGent and Lead of the Royal Library of Belgium’s Digital Research Lab.

Her research expertise is in historical social network analysis. From 2017 – 2020 she was a DH Fellow on the ERC Agents of Change Research project [...] Read full biography

Fien Danniau

Fien Danniau is master in History (2005) and joined the team in 2018. As our public historian she focuses on collection management, digital storytelling, user interaction and education in digital humanities. She also functions as go-between for the heritage sector and advises on educational projects. Her work at the GhentCDH is complementary with her job as project manager and teaching assistant at the Institute for Public History (Ghent University) where since 2009 she [...] Read full biography

Tess Dejaeghere

Tess Dejaeghere is a PhD student at GhentCDH who is currently working on the Computational Literary Studies (CLS) Horizon 2020 project, where she will be developing NLP workflows to apply to multilingual literary-historical data. After her studies in interpreting (VUB), Tess obtained an Advanced Masters degree in Digital Humanities (KULeuven) and a Masters degree in Digital Text Analysis (UAntwerpen) respectively, where she gained expertise in machine learning, AI and [...] Read full biography

Vincent Ducatteeuw

Vincent Ducatteeuw is a MA in History (Ghent University, 2020) and a MA in Education (Ghent University, 2020). As an educational historian his main interests involve public history, education and digital humanities. He joined GhentCDH in 2020 as research collaborator with a focus on digitization and data analysis. During this time he worked on two large-scale public history projects. The development of Cinema Belgica, an open access data platform for cinema history in [...] Read full biography

Lise Foket

Lise Foket holds a MA in History (Ghent University, 2020) and an Advanced Master in Digital Humanities (KULeuven, 2021). She joined the team of GhentCDH in 2021 as a research collaborator. As a Liaison Officer, her tasks include the coordination, communication and outreach of GhentCDH projects, mostly in the context of the CLARIAH-Flanders Open Humanities Research Infrastructure Project ( [...] Read full biography

Davy Verbeke

Davy Verbeke is MA in History (Universiteit Gent, 2011), MA in English Literature (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 2014) and completed a teacher training (CVO Kisp, 2013). He has been a teaching assistant at Ghent University’s History Department since 2014. As a public historian, he has worked on the online platform on Ghent University’s history UGentMemorie (2016-2017) and for the Tervuren  [...] Read full biography

Former members

Cliff Beeckman

Cliff Beeckman is an application developer at the Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities (GhentCDH). He joined GhentCDH in 2018 and his current focus is the development of collaborative databases. Cliff has a Master of Science in Computer Science (Ghent University, 2007) and a Master of Philosophy (Ghent University, 2010). He formerly worked at the Belgian Data Protection Authority (previously known as the Privacycommission) as an Information Security Advisor.

Tamar Cachet

Tamar Cachet holds a MA in History (Ghent University, 2014) and a MA in Public History (University of Western Ontario, Canada, 2015). In 2016-2017 she worked at the State Archives/CegeSoma where she developed www.belgiumWWII.be, an online platform on the history of Belgium during the Second World War. As a public historian her main interests include the challenges of new media for public history, and historical documentary and [...] Read full biography

Joke Daems

Joke Daems is a postdoctoral research assistant Digital Humanities. She holds a PhD in Translation Studies and she offers support to the Ghent Centre of Digital Humanities (GhentCDH) on a faculty level, with a focus on digital language and text analysis. She joined GhentCDH in 2017 and is responsible for the coordination of the development of a digital text analysis platform as part of the DARIAH VRE-SI. In addition to the text platform, Joke wishes to create an overview [...] Read full biography

Florian Deroo

Florian Deroo

Florian Deroo holds a MA in History (Ghent University, 2016) and an MA in Liberal Studies (The New School, 2019). In 2016-2017 he worked as a research assistant for TIC-Collaborative on international connections in the field of social reform. He joined GhentCDH in 2019 and is currently developing a virtual exhibition for the TIC project with the web publication platform Omeka S. Besides the history of social reform, his research interests include the mobility of interwar  [...] Read full biography

Piraye Hacıgüzeller

Piraye Hacıgüzeller is a postdoctoral research assistant at the Archaeology Department of Ghent University and the Ghent Center for Digital Humanities. She has a BSc degree in civil engineering (METU, Turkey), an MA degree in Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology (KU Leuven) and a PhD in archaeology (UcL). Since 2003, she worked as a geospatial data manager and analyst in several archaeological research projects in the eastern Mediterranean. She has carried out postdoctoral [...] Read full biography

Tecle Zere

Tecle Zere holds a PhD in the natural sciences and a postgraduate diploma in ICT from the University of the Free State in South Africa. He has over 10 years experience, mainly as an ICT expert in the heritage sector, but also as a researcher and data expert. His current focus at the GhentCDH/DARIAH is development of the the Text Platform. He also contributes to the collaborative databases and pilot projects. Tecle works part-time for Amsab- [...] Read full biography