Sébastien de Valeriola
Sébastien is the founder and leader of QuaDiHum Lab. He is a mathematician (with a speciality in partial differential equations), an actuary (with a speciality in quantitative finance and data science applied to banking and insurance) and a historian (with a speciality in medieval socio-economic history). This triple training naturally led him to digital humanities, which he sees as the application of quantitative methods to data and issues in the humanities, and the methodological and epistemological reflections that this application entails. He is currently involved in projects touching history, archeology, linguistics, journalism… Any quantitative method draws his interest, but at present he is mainly working with network analysis, text and data mining, and image processing.
Marie Serisier
Marie’s research as a PhD candidate (Université Libre de Bruxelles/Université Paris-Cité) focuses on the intricacies between the platform Reddit and the rise of masculinist movements online. After a master’s degree in corpus linguistics (Université Paris-Cité) leading to a thesis on the incel movement, she has decided to take things a step further with a PhD on the manosphere on Reddit. Her approach has thus taken a more quantitative turn and she is now happily diving into the world of digital humanities.
Anthony Leroy
Anthony is a software engineer at ULB Libraries since 2011. He is in charge of the digitization infrastructure and coordinates the activities of the SAFE PLN digital preservation network. He is also actively involved in various research data management activities at ULB.
His role in the team is to support DH activities by providing technical expertise in digitization, metadata management and digital preservation.
Anthony is an engineer in electronics and telecommunications with a PhD in microelectronics (ULB/IMEC) and has been a researcher for almost ten years in collaboration with several industrial partners.
Guillaume Quintin
Guillaume is a PhD candidate and the teaching and research assistant for the Master in Information and Communication Science and Technology (Université libre de Bruxelles). He combines expertise from both his Bachelor in Classics and Master in STIC: ancient languages, including Latin, and quantitative analysis methods. His research focuses on the corpus of hagiographic texts written in Latin during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. He is mainly interested in designing and implementing quantitative techniques to date the texts in his corpus, following the lines of his Master thesis on a stylometric analysis of medieval Latin texts. He also uses traditional qualitative methods from history, philology, and linguistics to confirm leads from quantitative approaches about particular cases in his corpus.
Alexia Vidalenche
Alexia Vidalenche is a PhD candidate and a teaching assistant for the Master in Journalism and the Bachelor in Information and Communication at ULB. Her thesis focuses on the poetics of the journalist’s portrait in French and French-speaking daily newspapers, and in particular on the way in which journalists represent their professional practices, between 1830 and 1940. From a methodological point of view, the research develops a classification model for journalistic genres, using the Tidysupervise package in R, as well as other text mining methods applied to the digitized press. At the same time, she is creating a Heurist database of journalists’ portraits published in the press between 1930 and 1940. She is also involved in the CAMille project (ULB-KBR) which develops a history of journalism through its critical discourse and an online dictionary of Belgian journalists. She participated in the ANR Numapresse which contributs to a cultural history of the press through digital humanities (France, 2017-2023).
Matthieu Pichon
Matthieu is a postdoctoral researcher working on the project “(Dé)chiffrer la recherche à l’ULB : une approche scientométrique des thèses de doctorat défendues depuis la création de l’Université” (PI : Sébastien de Valeriola & Kenneth Bertrams). Our aim is to analyze the digitized corpus of thousands of PhD theses defended at ULB since the university was founded in 1834, mainly using quantitative natural language processing (NLP) methods. Matthieu holds a PhD in History of Geography from the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (France). In this thesis, he investigated the social history of the relations between the French academic field of geography and urban policy and planning between the 1960s and the 1990s; mobilizing both qualitative and quantitative methods of archive analysis.