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New co-director strengthens DATALAB’s interdisciplinarity

With an interdisciplinary background and specialization in the use of quantitative methods and computational tools in analysis of cultural data, DATALAB’s new co-director is a perfect fit for the center.

As DATALAB ventures into large-scale interdisciplinary projects on an international level – marked by the two prestigious Horizon 2020 grants – Kristoffer Nielbo is appointed as co-director. According to center director Anja Bechmann, Kristoffer Nielbo’s skill set will be invaluable in this process: 

 “Kristoffer has an excellent track record in the field of computing in the humanities, and he has a high degree of respect for disciplinary challenges and opportunities in interdisciplinary computing projects. With him on our team, we will be able to take in bigger projects on an international level,” she says.

In particular, Anja Bechmann believes that the new co-director will make a great contribution in terms of recruiting new researchers and increasing the skills of DATALAB’s existing researchers and developers.

Kristoffer Nielbo has already worked with DATALAB, contributing with ideas on how to develop methods and infrastructure to meet research challenges, and he is excited about his new role at the center:

“DATALAB is a centre of gravity for researchers who explore cultural behavior using data-intensive methods, and it will be an ideal testing ground to introduce large-scale computing in the social sciences and humanities,” he says.

Kristoffer Nielbo’s research is a perfect match with DATALAB, researching the intersection between data and cultural behaviour. In this research he has explored the cultural information space in new and innovative ways by combining cultural data and humanities theories with statistics, computer algorithms, and visualisation.

In addition to his new position at DATALAB, Kristoffer Nielbo also takes over as the director of the Centre for Humanities Computing Aarhus. This means that he will be able to anchor the interests of DATALAB, as the field of humanities computing is restructured internally at Aarhus University – a major benefit to DATALAB, if you ask Anja Bachmann:

“This will mean that we will have better access to high-performance computing in integrated safe-space solutions,” she says. All in all, Anja Bechmann is excited about the new co-director:

 “On behalf of DATALAB, I am delighted that Kristoffer Nielbo has agreed to take on the role of co-director of the center”.