Welcome to my site. I’m a researcher and infrastructure manager at Aarhus University Denmark. As a researcher, I use computational and data-driven approaches to understand the dynamics of sociocultural systems. As an infrastructure manger, I strive to empower and accelerate humanities and social science research through interactive computing and collaborative development. Throughout my academic career, I have participated in a range inter- and transdisciplinary research projects that have explored the cultural information space aided by statistics, computer algorithms, and visualization.

Current Projects

Together with my colleagues Rebekah Baglini, Peter B. Vahlstrup and PhD student Kenneth Enevoldsen, I am currently developing an algorithm for change detection in written media content. The project is part of the HOPE How Democracies Cope with COVID19 project that is funded by the Carlsberg Foundation. (see, News Information Decoupling and When No News Is Bad News).

By using the linear relationship between how novel a news story is and how persistent it is, we have demonstrated that our algortihm can predict the COVID-19 phase 1 lockdown as early as the first confirmed case on February 27, 2020.

Mads Rosendahl Thomsen and I have received funding from the Velux Foundation to develop Fabula-NET, a decision support system for quality assessment of fiction that combines automated narrative analysis with with market intelligence and demographic factors. With Fabula-NET, we promote transparency and bias awareness in algorithmic decision making.

Initial experiments with Fabula-NET’s narrative analyzer module confirming that the content of Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) is a classic. in (Hu et all 2020), we argued that the Hurst exponent (upper) of a story arc (lower) is predictive of literary quality

With my colleague Katrine F. Baunvig I am working on a comparative study of innovation, creativity and motivational drivers in Danish textual cultural heritage, with a particular focus on N.F.S Grundtvig (1783-1872), H.C. Andersen (1805-1875) and S.A. Kierkegaard (1813-1855) (see, A Curious Case of Entropic Decay).

The persistence of lexical density in N.F.S. Grundtvig writings reflect three to five distinct states in his life. Grundtvig (1783-1872) was a Danish pastor, author, poet, philosopher, historian, teacher and politician that has played a pivotal role in shaping the modern welfare state.

Center for Humanities Computing Aarhus has joined the consortium behind DeiC’s Type 1 HPC Interactive system. Together with collegues from University of Southern Denmark’s SDU eScience Center and Aalborg University’s CLAAUDIA, we work to provide researchers easy access to interactive computing in the cloud.

I manage Nordic Digital Humanities Laboratory a collaboration about a shared software and application layer for modeling and analysis of cultural heritage data across the Nordics. NDHL is funded by the Nordic e-Infrastructure Collaboration (NeIC).

Previous Projects

With my colleagues Melvin Wevers and Jianbo Gao, I have published a study on a large-scale automated text analysis project about long-range dependence (LRD) and the effects of advertisments in Dutch newspapers: Tracking the Consumption Junction:Temporal Dependencies in Dutch Newspaper Articles and Advertisements.

Jianbo Gao, Mads Rosendahl Thomsen and I have published a study on the fractal properties of narratives, which led us to propose a set of theoretical propositions on the necessary properties of optimal narrative structure: Dynamic evolution of sentiments in Never Let Me Go: Insights from multifractal theory and its implications for literary analysis

Centre for Humanities Computing Aarhus

As of February 1, 2019, Aarhus University has established Center for Humanities Computing Aarhus (CHCAA). The centre forms the spearhead of computational literacy for researchers in the Humanities. We adopt, research and develop tomorrow’s data-driven humanities methodologies, tools, and synergies. Our aim is to empower researchers with relevant, efficient, and usable resources and mindsets. We acquire, research, and develop state-of-the-art technologies, methodologies, and best practices for research on digital data in the Humanities. The CHCAA maintains a working pipeline to produce the best learning material for you to acquire relevant cutting edge technologies in a humane format.

Calculus of Culture @ Aarhus University

Calculus of Culture is a interdisciplinary research network (members from humanities, CS and mathematics) that has been meeting twice during 2017 (Guangxi University/China & Aarhus University/Denmark) in order to develop methods and tools for data-driven research of culture. We just finished our meeting at Aarhus University (core participants in picture).

Scandinavian Literature Hack @ University of California Los Angeles

November 13-14, 2017 I participated in a hackfest event working on Scandinavian literature at UCLA (!!!) funded by the Mellon Foundation. After a sleepless night, we presented a study of optimality criteria for fairy tales (and other fiction) tested on 8000+ Danish documents. H.C Andersen turns out to be the paradigm of literary optimality.

Culture Analytics Reunion @ Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics (UCLA)

December 11-15, 2017, the Culture Analytics group from Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics had their first reuion at the Lake Arrowhead retreat in California. Take-home message: Math Changes Everything