The upcoming CREATE Salon takes place on Thursday 22 November between 3:00-5:00pm, UBA Doelenzaal, Singel 425 Amsterdam. This month’s topic is the Amsterdam Time Machine. During the salon, invited speakers will introduce their projects and and we will discuss three pilot projects within the larger CLARIAH project on the Amsterdam Time Machine: linguistics, social and economic history and media studies
I. Linguistics: a reconstruction of nineteenth-century Amsterdam dialects and sociolects, Marieke van Erp (KNAW Humanities Cluster) and Nicoline van der Sijs (Meertens Instituut)
According to some linguists there was a whopping number of 19 neighbourhood dialects in Amsterdam, next to three sociolects: the languages of the low, high, and middle classes. Is it possible to reconstruct these dialects and sociolects based on preserved historical information? And were there indeed so many different ‘accents’?
II. Social and Economic History: Amsterdam Elite, Richard Zijdeman (IISG) and Ivo Zandhuis (AdamNet)
In this project we transform the original dataset (1986) by Boudien de Vries on Amsterdam Elite 1850-1895 into Linked Open Data. This process links additional, social-demographic data that has been developed since and enables new analysis and visualization.
III. Media Studies: Amsterdam Cinema Audiences, Julia Noordegraaf (CREATE) and Vincent Baptist (CREATE)
The consumption of film as a new medium by historical audiences has traditionally been hard to grasp, since sources were sparse, distributed and difficult to analyse in combination. The Media Studies use case aims to develop a better understanding of the historical audiences of Amsterdam cinema theatres in the early 20th century by combining data on cinema theatres and programming from the online Cinema Context database with contextual data on the socio-economic composition of cinema neighborhoods in a geospatial analysis based on the georeferenced and vectorized maps made available in the CLARIAH Amsterdam Time Machine project.