Great interest in jubilee symposium ‘Door Data Gedreven’

Dozens of registrations started arriving at DANS shortly after the first announcement of the symposium 'Door Data Gedreven' (Driven by Data), which will be held in The Hague on 2 December. That is remarkable as the program and its session chairs are not yet known. The organization hopes to finalize the program soon.

The topic, which the subtitle describes as ‘New research insights as a result of innovative data use', turns out to draw a great deal of interest from researchers in the social sciences and humanities. DANS opted for a broad setup in which session chairs from a wide range of disciplines share experiences with innovative research on the basis of reused data. The increasing availability of data for reuse leads to more and more new methods and to different research questions being answered than before, according to the institute. In its announcement of the symposium, it says that it sees a sunny future for the social sciences and humanities as a result of those developments.

According to the organizers, more attention will be paid to that future than to the past that was the reason for this meeting. Forty-five years ago, the first scientific data archive was established in the Netherlands: The Steinmetz archive for the social sciences. In 1989, twenty years ago, the Netherlands Historic Data Archive was founded and five years later, the Scientific Statistic Agency. And five years ago, the Electronic Depot for Dutch archeology was launched. Meanwhile, all these institutes became incorporated into DANS.

More information about the symposium (in Dutch) can be found elsewhere on this web site, where the program and line-up will also become available soon. You can also register there.