Meertens/HuC

Centre type

Meertens Institute / KNAW Humanities Cluster


The Meertens Institute is an institute of the Royal Netherlands' Academy of Arts and Sciences. It was founded in 1932 as a bureau for the documentation of Dutch dialects. In later years, Dutch ethnology and onomastics have been included in the documentative tasks of the institute. At this moment, the Meertens Institute is primarily a research institute with substantial collections in the fields of language variation, European ethnology and onomastics. In the past 10 years the institute has worked on making these collections available in a digital format and in open access through the website of the institute (https://www.meertens.knaw.nl/cms/nl/databanken). Recently, the Meertens’ collections are becoming available to the research community using CLARIN infrastructure guidelines and best practices. In addition, the Meertens Institute has developed, in collaboration with other CLARIN partners, a variety of tools and services are developed that may be accessed through the institute’s servers.
The institute is an active participant in the Dutch CLARIN organisation. It leads large infrastructure projects such as Search&Develop and TTNWW, and it is involved in the IIP infrastructure project. It also participates in several smaller Clarin-projects, Marc Kemps-Snijders is the Dutch representative in the CLARIN EU centre committee. The institute is represented in the Executive Board of CLARIN-NL (Bennis) and in the National Advisory Panel (Barbiers, Brugman, Kemps Snijders). Moreover, Bennis represents the Netherlands in the CLARIN-EU Scientific Board.

Centre scope

Focus Examples
relevant for the study of function, meaning and coherence of cultural expressions and resources relevant for the structural, dialectological and sociolinguistic study of language variation within the Dutch language typological databases for Dutch dialects, descriptions of Dutch songs, databases of Dutch names, etc. For more examples, see here

Research domain

Website

Contact details

general contact: clarin@di.huc.knaw.nl

Country

Netherlands