I joined the Navez Project as part of my advanced master’s in Digital Humanities at KU Leuven, drawn by the opportunity to explore the correspondence of François-Joseph Navez and uncover the social networks and art education of 19th-century Brussels. With a background in Social and Cultural Anthropology and Social Psychology, I’ve always been fascinated by how historical content can be analyzed through contemporary tools. The internship offered precisely that: a chance to bridge the past and the future.
My tasks included preparing and reviewing the digitization of Navez’s correspondence, transforming letter images into searchable text using OCR tools like Transkribus, and reconciling data with tools like OpenRefine and the Getty Thesaurus. I also worked on annotation processes using tools like ELABA and Inception, deepening my understanding of computational methods applied to historical texts. These tasks not only expanded my technical skills but also revealed the challenges and intricacies of preserving and analyzing cultural heritage.
One of the most valuable aspects of the internship was applying topic modeling to identify the main themes in Navez’s correspondence, which demonstrated the potential of digital tools in uncovering new insights about historical texts.
A particularly memorable moment came when everything clicked as I diagrammed the workflow for my thesis, visualizing how the letters moved through each stage of the digitization process. It reminded me how beautifully historical objects, representing the past, can integrate with the digital tools of the present and future.
Moreover, being part of a prestigious institution like KBR, even briefly, was an incredible experience that made me feel like I was contributing to something larger.
Through this internship, I gained technical skills in OCR, topic modeling, and dataset reconciliation while also learning patience and persistence in navigating complex workflows. Personally, it deepened my passion for bridging cultural heritage with digital innovation, confirming my commitment to using these tools to preserve and analyze the past. This experience wasn’t just about learning methods; it was about realizing the powerful synergy between history and technology and how they together shape our understanding of both the past and the future.