Alie Lassche

Former PhD Student

Biography

My research is embedded in the NWO-project ‘Chronicling Novelty. New knowledge in the Netherlands, 1500 – 1850’. We investigate the circulation and evaluation of new knowledge and ideas among a non-specialist public of middle-class authors in the Netherlands, who kept handwritten chronicles to record events and phenomena that they considered important. I am mainly interested in the relation between the collection of knowledge and cultural change, as reflected in a corpus of ~300 Dutch early modern chronicles. I use computational methods to analyze both text and metadata in order to get insight in changes in information flows, cited sources, described topics, knowledge horizons, and regional differences in media use.

Alie Lassche completed the Research Master Dutch Literature and Culture at Utrecht University with distinction in July 2019. During her master, she specialized in the use of computational methods in literary and cultural research. She did an internship at the KNAW Meertens Institute (Amsterdam) and investigated the relationship between repetition in and popularity of early modern Dutch song lyrics. The result of this research was presented at the annual ADHO Digital Humanities Conference in Utrecht, July 2019. Alie wrote her master’s thesis on topical fluctuation in early modern Dutch songs. Prior to her master, she studied Dutch language and culture at Utrecht University and wrote a thesis on marginalia in seventeenth-century editions of Vondel’s play Palamedes (1625). Next to her studies, Alie worked as a student assistant at the department of Early Modern Literature at Utrecht University and at the DH2019 Conference. She was also part of the editorial board of the academic journal Vooys, tijdschrift voor letteren for two years.:::