Drs. Joris J. van Zundert (1972) is a senior researcher and developer in humanities computing. He holds a research position in the department of literary studies at the Huygens Institute for the History of The Netherlands, a research institute of The Netherlands Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). His main interest as a researcher and developer is in the possibilities of computational algorithms for the analysis of literary and historic texts, and the nature and properties of humanities information and data modelling. His current research focuses on computer science and humanities interaction and the tensions between hermeneutics and ‘big data’ approaches.
Joris van Zundert was attracted to the Huygens Institute in 2005 to form a digital humanities research and development group. Subsequently he headed the ‘Digital Humanities Software R&D Team’ from 2006 until 2009. Between 2009 and 2012 he was the appointed project manager of the Royal Academy’s Alphalab project—a cooperative project by six Royal Academy institutes to determine the requirements of a digital infrastructure for humanities and to explore and test drive the possibilities of computational humanities for that field. In 2007 he also became Chair of the European funded Interedition project, which grew into a European/US initiative to foster interoperability and collaboration in tool development for digital textual scholarship. In 2012 he was added to the management team of the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands and became responsible for the 3 year Methodology research programme aimed at integrating suitable digital tools and techniques into the humanities methodological approaches. Since 2016 he is full senior researcher in the department of Literary Studies of the same institute.