Hilde De Weerdt

Working with a small museum/archive/project with digitized images but little metadata?

I'm looking for testers for a VLM pipeline for auto-enrichment (transcription, captions, tags, IIIF). If you share a few sample images, I'll run them through + share results. Would love to hear your feedback!

In defence of higher education & research:
Sign the petition and join the protest in Brussels on Dec 11, 12pm
For
The allocation of basic funding for higher education;
No increase of current registration fees;
No cuts in scholarships
hogeronderwijsinopstand.be
hogeronderwijsinopstand.be/english/

Screenshot of the IMMARKUS annotation interface with three historical images—an Oxford bookplate, a medieval-style world map, and an early printed nautical map—displayed side by side, with metadata fields visible on the right.

🎉 IMMARKUS 1.0.5 is out! The latest release of our open-source image annotation tool for humanities, heritage & museum professionals is now available – with bug fixes, productivity enhancements, and improved #IIIF annotation import.

Try it here: immarkus.xmarkus.org
Docs: github.com/rsimon/immar...

Cold and rainy but good fun at the annual Science Day in Leuven where we demonstrated how anyone can easily collect and work creatively with high-quality images streamed from cultural organizations globally. #dvdw2025 #IMMARKUS

Somewhat of a surprise to me when this came up on a newsfeed: we're used to hearing that the Netherlands tops the list of the global EF English Proficiency Index, but it appears Flanders tops the Netherlands, and most Flemish provinces significantly outperform most Dutch provinces...

More on the sources and source ecologies for infrastructural studies, and comparative regional and social histories of infrastructures on the way.

2. A multidisciplinary @asianstudies.org forum on Critical Approaches to Chinese Infrastructures with perspectives from history, sociology, urban studies, anthropology, development studies, religious studies, and digital humanities is about to go into production with the Journal of Asian Studies.

WIth colleagues collaborating on the Lives and Afterlives of Material Infrastructures we worked on methods & theoretical perspectives first; first results:
1. Our digital humanities quarterly article on semantic annotation of text and image is out and live! dhq.digitalhumanities.org/vol/19/4/000...

KU Leuven - Ga op digitale schattenjacht en word een wereldverzamelaar! - Op Locatie - Dag van de Wetenschap Ontdek het uitgebreide aanbod aan activiteiten van Dag van de Wetenschap. En goed nieuws: heel wat digitale Dag van de Wetenschap-activiteiten blijven immers gewoon online staan. Voortaan is het dus e...

Kom langs op 23 november. Wij zijn te vinden in de Universiteitsbibliotheek vanaf 11u met een korte sessie over het verzamelen, annoteren en vertalen met AI van beeldmateriaal wereldwijd.
Ga op digitale schattenjacht; word een wereldverzamelaar!
www.dagvandewetenschap.be/activiteiten...
#dvdw2025

Periodicals and the World Since their inception, periodicals have travelled across regions, reporting on local and global events and developments, and shaping public discourse on wh...

CFP: 14th Annual ESPRit conference: “Periodicals and the World”

9-11 September 2026, Royal Library of Belgium (KBR), Brussels

events.vub.be/periodicals-...

I'll give an overview of our work on the history of infrastructural repair and disrepair, a preview of a methodological article that is coming up in Digital Humanities Quarterly this month. #DH

Distam :“Fouille de texte et TAL en études aréales” le 3 novembre au Pôle des langues et civilisations (Paris) Le consortium propose le 3 novembre une synthèse des travaux effectués au cours des quatre années passées ainsi que les perspectives d’exploitation des corpus textuels envisagés dans le cadre d’une pr...

Sorry to miss Beijing Forum on AI next week, but glad to be in Paris tomorrow afternoon for a retrospective on 4 years of DISTAM, a French network on Digital Research for African and Asian Area Studies, led by Prof. Marie Bizais-Lillig
For those in and around Paris: distam.hypotheses.org/21048

en doen dat zowel door vertalen van Chinees werk naar het Engels via bestaande en eigen kanalen als door steun voor Chinees taalonderwijs. Maar idd cultureel is het opboksen tegen Japan en Korea.

In China wordt al een paar decennia heel veel uit het Engels vertaald naar het Chinees. Er ligt in de wetenschappelijke wereld een sterke nadruk op internationale publicaties, en dat is vooral Engels. De overheden zetten ook in op culturele zichtbaarheid mondiaal

Participants looking at the screen that shows a slide with maps.

Had the chance to join a workshop on image annotation in IMMARKUS led by @hildedw.bsky.social, Rainer Simon, Sunkyu Lee, and Dawn Zhuang today. This was great fun and definitely a tool I will use when working with visual media and texts in the future! #digitalhumanities

It has a cover...
uhpress.hawaii.edu/bookseries/p...

CFP for a workshop to be held in Leuven in September 2026 on Histories of Scholarly Evaluation in the Sciences and Humanities 1700–2000 - deadline: Jan 2026
hshh.ugent.be/en/news/cfp-...

KU Leuven - Ga op digitale schattenjacht en word een wereldverzamelaar! - Op Locatie - Dag van de Wetenschap Ontdek het uitgebreide aanbod aan activiteiten van Dag van de Wetenschap. En goed nieuws: heel wat digitale Dag van de Wetenschap-activiteiten blijven immers gewoon online staan. Voortaan is het dus e...

November 23 is open science day. Come check out what research is going on at universities across Flanders. As part of the offerings in Leuven we're conducting 2 30-minute workshops on working with high-quality digital images in the arts. Register here www.dagvandewetenschap.be/activiteiten... #DVDW

Oct 23 1-3pm we're conducting a workshop on semantic image annotation at the LECTIO institute for intellectual history from Antiquity through early modern times. The workshop is open to all. Participants can join in person or online but need to register from this site www.kuleuven.be/lectio/event...

Wetenschap is overal en we tellen af naar de 15de Dag van de Wetenschap op zondag 23 november 2025.

Vrijdag 10/10 om 10u10 komen honderden activiteiten online www.dagvandewetenschap.be.

Dompel je onder en stippel jouw ideale #dvdw2025 uit met jouw eigen profiel.

Tenure track professor in Contemporary Middle East Studies (Faculty of Arts, KU Leuven) The East Asian and Arabic Research Unit of the Faculty of Arts at KU Leuven is seeking a full-time tenure-track professor (ZAP) in contemporary Middle East Studies. The professorship will commence on ...

Tenure track prof in Contemporary Middle East Studies KU Leuven
Unlike many European universities, Leuven has a tenure track system; university & faculty management are elected. There is a startup fund of 110,000€. Leuven has a sabbatical policy.
www.kuleuven.be/personeel/jo...

New in #IMMARKUS: when you import a #IIIF manifest, IMMARKUS now imports existing annotations (embedded or referenced) into your workspace.

We'd love to test with real-world examples. If you know of IIIF collections with annotations, let us know. Annotated manifests still seem rare in the wild...

Beatrice de Graaf: Antifa-besluit Tweede Kamer is ‘een knuppel om tegenstanders monddood te maken’ ‘Een schok’, zo noemt Beatrice de Graaf het besluit van de Tweede Kamer om de Antifa-beweging als terroristische organisatie aan te merken.

informatief interview met historicus Beatrice de Graaf waarin ze het besluit van de meerderheid in de Tweede Kamer om Antifa als terroristische organisatie te kenmerken scherp veroordeelt.

www.historischnieuwsblad.nl/antifa/

"This is what it looks like when a society’s elite rolls over in the face of authoritarianism. It never ends well.'

Robert Redford, Screen Idol Turned Director and Activist, Dies at 89 He made serious topics like grief and political corruption resonate with the masses, in no small part because of his own star power.

RIP Robert Redford, who famously and beautifully brought Norman Maclean’s *A River Runs Through It* to the big screen:

so you can zoom in the tiniest of details and take them with you to do with whatever you want--I added a screenshot of the well-known exam cheat shirt, that you could now read (or in our IMMARKUS service, transcribe and translate with the assistance of a range of AI models). Cheers!

Forms & Function

If you are interested in the history of book, check out this phenomenal exhibit curated by the wonderful Martin Heijdra at Princeton. It is a model exhibit in so many ways, covering different parts of the world, so many languages, and, images are in IIIF
dpul.princeton.edu/global-book-...

"drastic plans to halve the intake of humanities students at one of China’s most prestigious institutions, Fudan University, divided opinions among scholars." Has anyone seen more on this?

From the supposed advocates of freedom of speech and the supposed critics of "cancel culture": target lists continued.

Very pleased to see The Young Academy's important report on First Generation Academics published as a book. Hoping that this coming academic year will be better for all, including first generation academics!

To read online www.linkedin.com/posts/de-jon...
and
www.dejongeakademie.nl/nieuws/30313...