First of all, I would like to say that the majority of Dutch people I have had interactions with are hilarious. Deadpan and hilarious.
For example: At a tapas place we went to, when our waiter had disappeared and we wanted to leave, I went up to the bartender and said, "May I pay you?" He said, completely straightfaced, "Well, of course, if you had something to eat, you should pay." 20 seconds later, he smiled. I don't think I am translating the humor well, but it was p.d. funny.
Anyway, this lecture was on text mining and cultural heritage, and it was also AMAZING. Apparently all the smart people in the world are in Holland, and they are not only smart, they are researching cool things and are blond and beautiful as well.
Marieke van Erp is a computer scientist using linguistics and things like the k nearest neighbor classifier. If you want to know what that is, I will find the youtube link that was awesome in explaining it. It's a little tricky and I don't want to mess up anyone's understanding by butchering an explanation.
Anyway, the informatics undergrads were all looking at Marieke like she was a goddess the whole time, and asked more questions than ever, which I was super glad about because sometimes I worry that they are bored with libraries discussion. But this was more about building effective databases and search and retrieval and it was AWESOME. Her recent major research project was around helping scientists at the Leiden Naturalis Museum. Apparently there is a 20 story tower there full of dead specimens important to scientists around the globe, that needed cataloguing and easy accessibility for said scientists. She talked about building that database and what you do with things like "special remarks."
She's currently working on combining access to heterogenous collections from different institutions (like the Rijksmuseum and the NISV), in an easy to search, high-precision catalog. How cool is that?
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