In February 2022, I joined the core team of "Canonfestival", a literary festival and survey concerning the literary canon of Dutch literature. The goal of this project was to bring a follow-up to the 2002 canon survey by DBNL and open up a debate on the morphology and place of a literary canon in modern times.
My involvement
In the Canonfestival project, I was responsible for the technical supervision of both the survey and the festival around it. This means I took charge of the following aspects of the project:
- Survey design: deciding of the format of the questions, implementing the question logic, assessing feasibility and deploying the survey in Qualtrics. Also pre-testing of the survey and quality control.
- Data processing: cleaning the data, associating survey responses with a literary database of more than 2.000.000 works and authors using "CanonMatch", a tailor-made program written in Python and Javascript.
- Statistical analysis: analysing the results of the survey in R using regression analysis, visualising the results in a meaningful way and providing the general structure for the report.
- Web design: building canonfestival.org from scratch and disseminating the results online.
Responsible parties
The project was a cross-institutional effort by KANTL, Taalunie, NL-Lab, Raad voor de Neerlandistiek, KB-DBNL and Platform Neerlandistiek. The core team consisted of Lieke van Deinsen, Yra van Dijk, Judith Van Doorselaer, Thomas Van der Goten, Ralf Grüttemeier, Ryanne Keltjens, Nicolas Leus, Martijn Nicolaas, Wim Rutgers and Frank Willaert.