Current position

Rens Bod (rens.bod@gmail.com) is professor of Digital Humanities and History of Humanities, and a director of the Vossius Center for the History of Humanities and Sciences. He investigates the humanities from both computational and historical perspectives. He currently serves as president of the Society for the History of the Humanities, and is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities (KHMW) and of the Society for the Dutch Letters (MNL). He is also the founder of WOinActie, an action group that strives for properly funded and democratic universities. Bod is a recipient of an advanced research fellowship (UK), a personal academy fellowship (KNAW), a personal VIDI fellowship and a personal VICI fellowship (1.5 MEuro, NWO).

Bod is the author of the first historical overview of the humanities from Antiquity to the present: A New History of the Humanities (translated from the Dutch "De Vergeten Wetenschappen"). The book has appeared in seven translations, and was voted as best science book of 2011 by Kennislink and as one of the 25 books on science you "must  have read" by NRC Handelsblad.  The book has been reviewed by over 50 journals and newspapers and is acclaimed as "an extraordinarily ambitious undertaking ... the first ever history of its kind" (Times Literary Supplement) and "Bod takes the humanities back to their rightful place in the family tree of science."

Rens Bod has also published an Open Access monograph on the general history of knowledge disciplines, World of Patterns: A Global History of Knowledge, which explores the search for patterns and underlying principles in 20 disciplines from 5 continents across the sciences, social sciences and the humanities. The book was nominated for the Libris History Prize and has been translated into six languages.

Bod's most recent book is a world history of the meaning of life, which is currently being translated into English as Why Am I Here? A World History of the Search for Meaning. 

Bod's earlier work focused on (computational) linguistics, for example his seminal work on a natural language processing model that creates rule-like behavior without rules -- see his monograph Beyond Grammar: An Experience-Based Theory of Language.

Bod's computational work also covers computational musicology, digital aesthetics and computational literary studies. In the field of digital humanities, he coordinated several public-private partnerships in the humanities. He is one of the main architects of the Data-Oriented Parsing model, a general machine learning technique which has been applied to language, music, vision and reasoning.

Bod is a founding editor of the journal History of Humanities and the initiator of the conference series The Making of the Humanities. His books include Beyond Grammar (1998), Probabilistic Linguistics (2003), Data-Oriented Parsing (2003) and De Vergeten Wetenschappen (The Forgotten Sciences) (2010), and he co-edited three volumes on the comparative history of the humanities, The Making of the Humanities I, II and III (2010, 2012, 2014). 

 

Our multi-volume work The Making of the Humanities is now freely available. 

 

Click here for my recent books. 

Click here for the Center for Digital Humanities 

Click here for the Vossius Center on the History of Humanities and Sciences

Click here for my Language and Computation group 

Click here for my weblog on the history of the knowledge and the history of humanities

Click here for The Making of the Humanities conferences 

Click here for our new journal History of Humanities 

 

Current projects

The Flow of Cognitive Goods: Towards a Post-Disciplinary History of Knowledge

CREATE: Creative Amsterdam -- An E-Humanities Perspective (Spearpoint UvA)

Legal Structures (NSF/NWO Digging into Data)

Language in Interaction (NWO Gravitation)

The Riddle of Literary Quality (KNAW Computational Humanities)

CLARIAH: Common Lab Research Infrastructure for the Humanities (NWO Roadmap) 

 

Books and Edited Books

R. Bod, 2019. Een Wereld Vol Patronen: De Geschiedenis van Kennis, Prometheus.

R. Bod, 2019. Le Scienze Dimenticate, Carocci Editori.

R. Bod, 2017. 人文学的历史：被遗忘的科学, Peking University Press. Extended Chinese version of A New History of the Humanities, with new material on mohist logic, theories on parallel perspective, Chinese Ming and Qing linguistics. Censored by Peking University Press: the parts on 20^th century Chinese humanities (historiography, literary studies and art history) under Mao Zedong and the People’s Republic of China were not published.

R. Bod, 2015. Fully revised and updated paperback edition of A New History of the Humanities: The Search for Principles and Patterns from Antiquity to the Present. Oxford University Press.

R. Bod, 2013. A New History of the Humanities: The Search for Principles and Patterns from Antiquity to the Present. Oxford University Press.

Translated into Chinese (Peking University Press, Beijing), Korean (Torus Book, Seoul), Polish (Aletheia), Ukrainian, Armenian (Sargis Khachents), Italian (Carocci, Rome). Reviewed in 45+ journals and newspapers. Lead review in Times Literary Supplement of 6 June 2014; review essays in American Historical Review, Scientific American, Seminary Studies, Isis, Renaissance Society of America, Postmedieval, Il Sole 24 Ore a.o.

Selected among the best books of 2016 (from longlist of more than 500 books) at the Lviv Forum of Publishers,

see http://svoeradio.com/news/c-1/u_lvovi_23_vidannya_rozdilili_nagorodu_naykraschoyi_knizhki_roku

 

Selected among “Books of the Year” by Higher Education Strategy Associates (HESA), see http://higheredstrategy.com/books-of-the-year/

 

R. Bod, J. Maat and T. Weststeijn (eds.), 2014. The Making of the Humanities – Vol. III: The Modern Humanities, Amsterdam University Press.           

"monumental and expansively illustrated […] the three-volume history edited by Rens Bod, Jaap Maat, and Thijs Weststeijn, The Making of the Humanities, [is] a massive undertaking that documents with painstaking subtlety and detail the difficult transitions from the early modern to the modern period in the reformation of the European ratio studiorum of the arts, humanities, and natural sciences."  Robert Davis in http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/edth.12138/full

 

"A must-read for anyone interested in the history of a broad range of the humanities. It combines case studies of great historical precision with methodological considerations of historical epistemologies, with the explicit aim of matching the work done in the history of science with equivalent historical epistemologies of the various humanistic disciplines”, Reviewed in Isis, by Katherine Arens:

 

R. Bod, J. Maat and T. Weststeijn (eds.), 2012. The Making of the Humanities – Vol. II: From Early Modern to Modern Disciplines, Amsterdam University Press. (Reviewed in Choice and other journals)

R. Bod, 2012. Het Einde van de Geesteswetenschappen 1.0, Vossiuspers, Amsterdam University Press.

R. Bod, 2010. De Vergeten Wetenschappen: Een Geschiedenis van de Humaniora (“The Forgotten Sciences: A History of the Humanities”), Prometheus, Bert Bakker.

            Revised and updated second edition, 2011

            Revised and updated third edition, 2012

            Revised and updated fourth edition, 2013

            Revised and updated fifth edition, 2015, with new Preface

 

Chosen among best 25 books of 2010 by NRC Handelsblad.

Chosen among best non-fiction books by De Groene Amsterdammer.

Chosen as best science book by Kennislink in 2011.

Reviewed by >40 journals and newspapers.

R. Bod, J. Maat and T. Weststeijn (eds.), 2010. The Making of the Humanities – Vol. I: Early Modern Europe, Amsterdam University Press.

(Reviewed in Choice, H-Soz-u-Kult, European Review, Intellectual History Review, De Zeventiende Eeuw, Renaissance Quarterly)

• Sandrine Maufroy in H-Soz-u-Kult 02.12.2011, URL: http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/rezensionen/id=15753 .

• Nicolette Mout in European Review 20/2 (May 2012), pp. 297-299.

• Charles G. Nauert in Intellectual History Review 22/2 (2012), pp. 293-296.

• Anja-Silvia Goeing in Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 65, No. 3 (Fall 2012).

• Eric Jorink in De Zeventiende Eeuw 29/1 (2012).

 

R. Bod and D. Cochran (eds.), 2007. Proceedings ESSLLI workshop "Exemplar-Based Models of Language Acquisition and Use".  ESSLLI 2007.

 

R. Bod, J. Hay and S. Jannedy (eds.), 2003. Probabilistic Linguistics. Cambridge: The MIT Press. (Reviewed by >10 journals)

R. Bod, R. Scha and K. Sima'an (eds.), 2003. Data-Oriented Parsing. CSLI Publications/The University of Chicago Press. (Reviewed in Computational Linguistics)

R. Bod, 1998. Beyond Grammar: An Experience-Based Theory of Language. CSLI Publications/The University of Chicago Press. (Reviewed by >10 journals)

S. Battaglia and R. Bod, 1994. Amsterdam. Gruppo Editoriale Bramante, Milan.

 

Articles in Journals

R. Bod, 2018. “Modelling in the Humanities: Linking Patterns to Principles”, Historical Social Research, Supplement 31: “Models and Modelling between Digital Humanities – A Multidisciplinary Perspective”, 78-95. doi: 10.12759/hsr.suppl.31.2018.78-95.

 

R. Bod, 2018. “Has There Ever Been a Divide? A Longue Durée Perspective”, History of Humanities, Forum Session, 3(1), 15-26.

 

R. Bod, J. Kursell, J. Maat and T. Weststeijn, 2018, “Rethinking the Humanities and the Sciences”, History of Humanities, 3(1), 1-4.

 

R. Bod, J. Kursell, J. Maat and T. Weststeijn, 2017, “Practical and Material Histories of the Humanities”, History of Humanities, 2(1), 1-2.

 

A. van Cranenburgh, R. Scha & R, Bod, 2016. Data-Oriented Parsing with Discontinuous Constituents and Function Tags. Journal of Language Modelling, 4(1), 57-111.

 

R. Bod, J. Kursell, J. Maat and T. Weststeijn, 2016, “Going Global”, History of Humanities, 1(2), 211-212.

 

R. Bod, J. Kursell, J. Maat and T. Weststeijn, 2016, “A New Field: History of Humanities”, History of Humanities, 1(1), 1-8.

 

A. Zuccala, R. Guns, R. Cornacchia, & R. Bod. 2015. Can we rank scholarly book publishers? A bibliometric experiment with the field of history. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. 66(7), 1333–1347. DOI: 10.1002/asi.23267.

 

R. Bod, 2015. A Comparative Framework for Studying the History of Humanities and Science, Isis, 106(2), 367-377.

 

R. Bod and J. Kursell, 2015. The History of the Humanities and the History of Science, Isis, 106(2), 337-340.

 

B. Beekhuizen, R. Bod and A. Verhagen, 2014. The linking problem is a special case of a general problem none of us has solved. Language, 90(3), 91-96.

 

R.  Bod, 2013. Who’s Afraid of Patterns? The Particular versus the Universal and the Meaning of Humanities 3.0. BMGN – Low Countries Historical Review, 128(4), 171-180.

 

B. Beekhuizen, R. Bod and W. Zuidema, 2013. Three Design Principles of Language: The Search for Parsimony in Redundancy, Language and Speech, 56(3), 257-264.

 

S. Frank, R. Bod and M. Christiansen, 2012. How Hierarchical is Language Use? Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 297(1747), 4522-4531.

 

P. Pauwels and R. Bod, 2012. Including the power of interpretation through a simulation of Peirce's process of inquiry. LLC: The Journal of Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 28(3):452-460.

 

F. Battaglia, G. Borensztajn and R. Bod, 2012. Structured cognition and neural systems: from rats to language, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 36(7), 1626–1639.

 

S. Frank and R. Bod, 2011. Insensitivity of the Human Sentence-Processing System to Hierarchical Structure, Psychological Science, 22(6), 829-834.

 

A. Honingh and R. Bod, 2011. In Search of Universal Properties of Musical Scales. Journal of New Music Research, 40(1), 81-89.

R. Bod, 2009. From Exemplar to Grammar: A Probabilistic Analogy-based Model of Language Learning, Cognitive Science, 33(5), 752-793.

G. Borensztajn, W. Zuidema and R. Bod, 2009. Children’s Grammars Grow More Abstract with Age. Topics in Cognitive Science, 1, 175-188.

R. Bod, 2009. Constructions at Work or at Rest? Cognitive Linguistics 20(1), 129-134.

 

R. Bod, 2008. De Unificatie van Menselijke Cognitie, ANTW (Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte), 100(2), 129-137.

 

R. Bod, 2007. Getting Rid of Derivational Redundancy or How to Solve Kuhn's Problem. Minds and Machines, 17(1), 47-66.

R. Bod, 2006. Exemplar-Based Syntax: How to Get Productivity from Examples. The Linguistic Review, 23(3), 291-320.

R. Bod, 2006. Towards a General Model of Applying Science. International Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 20(1), 6-25.

R. Bod, M. Boon and M. Boumans, 2006. Introduction to Applying Science. International Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 20(1), 1-5.

R. Bod, H. Fitz and W. Zuidema, 2006. On the Structural Ambiguity in Natural Language that the Neural Architecture Cannot Deal With. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 29(1).

A. Honingh and R. Bod, 2005. The Notion of Convexity in Music. Journal of New Music Research, 34(3), 293-303.

R. Bod, 2003. Do All Fragments Count? Journal of Natural Language Engineering, 9(4), 307-323.

R. Bod, 2002. A Unified Model of Structural Organization in Language and Music. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 17,  289-308.

R. Bod, 2002. Memory-Based Models of Melodic Analysis: Challenging the Gestalt Principles. Journal of New Music Research, 31(1), 27-36.

R. Bod, 2000. Context-Sensitive Spoken Dialogue Processing with the DOP Model. Journal of Natural Language Engineering 5(4), 306-323.

R. Scha, R. Bod and K. Sima'an, 1999. Memory-Based Syntactic Analysis. Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence 11(3), 409-440.

R. Scha and R. Bod, 1993. Computational Aesthetics. Informatie en Informatiebeleid 11(1), 54-63.

 

 

Chapters in Books

R. Bod, 2017. How Interactions between Humanities and Science Have Shaped our Knowledge. In: The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters Yearbook 2016, Novus Forlag, 235-248.

 

B. Beekhuizen, R. Bod, & A. Verhagen, 2017. Acquiring relational meaning from the situational context: What linguists can learn from analyzing videotaped interaction. In Usage-Based Approaches to Language Acquisition and Language Teaching, Mouton de Gruyter, 48-73.

 

R. Bod, 2015. Five Questions. In Fenrong Liu and Jeremy Seligman (eds.). History of Logic in China. Automatic Press/VIP.

 

R. Bod, 2015. The Importance of the History of Philology Or the Unprecedented Impact of the Study of Texts. In T. van Kalmthout and H. Zuidervaart (eds.), The Practice of Philology in the Nineteenth Century Netherlands, Amsterdam University Press.

 

Barend Beekhuizen and Rens Bod, 2014. Automating construction work Data-oriented parsing and constructivist accounts of language acquisition. In Ronny Boogaart, Timothy Colleman, Gijsbert Rutten (eds), Extending the Scope of Construction Grammar (CLR), De Gruyter Mouton.

 

P. Pauwels and R. Bod, 2014. Architectural design thinking as a form of model-based reasoning. In L. Magnani (Ed.), Model-Based Reasoning in Science and Technology (Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology, and Rational Ethics (SAPERE), 8), Springer, 583-608..

 

R. Bod 2012. Kan een computer zinnen ontleden? Artikel voor de Taalcanon (www.taalcanon.nl), Algemene Vereniging Taalkunde.

 

R. Bod 2012. Topstukken in de Taalwetenschap. Artikel voor de Taalcanon (www.taalcanon.nl), Algemene Vereniging Taalkunde.

 

R. Bod, 2012. How the Humanities Changed the World. Unione internazionale degli istituti di archeologia, storia e storia dell’arte in Roma, 110-124.

 

R. Bod, 2012. Insights from the Humanities that Changed the World, Brill Yearbook 2011, Brill, pp. 50-61.

 

R. Bod, 2012. The Dawn of the Modern Humanities, in R. Bod, J. Maat and T. Weststeijn (eds.), 2012. The Making of the Humanities – Vol. II: From Early Modern to Modern, Amsterdam University Press, pp. 9-19.

 

R. Bod, 2010. Probabilistic Linguistics. In Bernd Heine and Heiko Narrog (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis, Oxford University Press.

 

R. Bod, 2010. Historiography of the Humanities, in R. Bod, J. Maat and T. Weststeijn (eds.), 2010. The Making of the Humanities – Vol. I: Early Modern Europe, Amsterdam University Press.

R. Bod, 2008. The Data-Oriented Parsing Approach: Theory and Application, In J. Fulcher and L. Jain (eds.), Computational Intelligence: A Compendium, Springer, 307-342.

 

R. Bod, 2006. Exemplar-Based Reasoning with the Shortest Derivation. In L. Magnani (ed.), Model-Based Reasoning in Science and Engineering, College Publications, London, 119-140.

R. Bod, 2005. Exemplar-Based Explanation. In L. Magnani (ed.). Model-Based Reasoning in Science and Engineering. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston.

R. Bod and R. Scha, 2004. Data-Oriented Language Processing: An Overview. In G. Sampson and D. McCarthy (eds.), Corpus Linguistics: Reading in a Widening Discipline. Continuum International Ltd, London and New York. 304-325.

R. Bod, 2003. Extracting Stochastic Grammars from Treebanks. In A. Abeillé (ed.) Building and Using Parsed Corpora. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston. 333-350.

R. Bod, 2003. Introduction to Elementary Probability Theory and Formal Stochastic Language Theory. In R. Bod, J. Hay & S. Jannedy (eds.), Probabilistic Linguistics. The MIT Press, Cambridge, 9-38.

R. Bod and R. Scha, 2003. A DOP Model for Phrase-Structure Trees. In R. Bod, R. Scha and K. Sima'an (eds.) Data-Oriented Parsing. The University of Chicago Press. 13-25.

R. Bod and R. Kaplan, 2003. A DOP Model for Lexical-Functional Grammar. In R. Bod, R. Scha and K. Sima'an (eds.) Data-Oriented Parsing. The University of Chicago Press. 211-233.

R. Bod, 2002. A General Parsing Model for Language and Music. In Anagnostopoulou, C., Ferrand, M. & Smaill, A. (Eds.). Music and Artificial Intelligence (Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Music and Artificial Intelligence). Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 2445, Springer-Verlag. 5-17.

 

R. Bod and R. Scha, 1997. Data-Oriented Language Processing. In S. Young and G. Bloothooft (eds.) Corpus-Based Methods in Language and Speech Processing, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston. 137-173.

R. Bod, 1996. Monte Carlo Parsing. In H. Bunt and M. Tomita (eds.) Recent Advances in Parsing Technology, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston. 255-280.

N. Smith, M. Beers, R. Bod, R. Bolognesi and F. van der Leeuw, 1991. Lenition in a Sardinian dialect. In P. Bertinetto, M. Kenstowicz and M. Loporcaro (eds.) Certamen Phonologicum II, Rosenberg & Sellier, Turin. 309-328.

 

 

Papers in Peer-Reviewed Conference Proceedings

Davide Ceolin, Chantal van Son, Lora Aroyo, Julia Noordegraaf, Ozkan Sener, Robin Sharma, Piek Vossen, Serge ter Braake, Lesia Tkacz, Inger Leemans, Rens Bod, 2018. InfoQ: Computational Assessment of Information Quality on the Web, Papers of the DHBenelux 2018 Conference, Amsterdam.

 

Serge ter Braake, Chantal van Son, Inger Leemans, Davide Ceolin, Lora Aroyo, Rens Bod, Julia Noordegraaf, Piek Vossen, 2018. The Vaccination Debate: An Exploration of Long Term Concept and Perspective Mining, Papers of the DHBenelux 2018 Conference, Amsterdam.

 

A. van Cranenburgh and R. Bod, 2017. A Data-Oriented Model of Literary Language. Proceedings EACL 2017, Valencia, Spain.

 

D. Hupkes and R. Bod, POS-tagging of Historical Dutch, Proceedings LREC 2016, 2016.

 

B. Beekhuizen, R. Bod, A. Fazly, S. Stevenson and A. Verhagen, 2014. A Usage-Based Model of Early Grammatical Development, in Proceedings Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics (CMCL) 2014, ACL-2014.

 

A. van Cranenburgh and R. Bod, 2013. Discontinuous Parsing with an Efficient and Accurate DOP Model. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Parsing Technologies. IWPT, 2013, Osaka.

 

P. Pauwels, D. Di Mascio, R. De Meyer and R. Bod, 2013.  Integrating building information modelling and semantic web technologies for management of built heritage information, Proceedings DigitalHeritage2013, Marseille.

 

R. Bod, 2013. Sequential Structure Suffices to Solve Nativist Puzzles. Proceedings CogSci 2013, Berlin.

 

A. Zuccala, R. Guns and R. Bod, 2013. Fortresses of books: A bibliometric foray into ranking scholarly publishers. In Proceedings 18th International Conference on Science and Technology Indicators, STI 2013, Berlin.

 

R. Bod, B. Físseni, C. León and B. Löwe, 2012. Computational Models of Narrative Structure, Digital Humanities 2012, Hamburg.

 

R. Bod, B. Fisseni, A. Kurji, B. Löwe, Objectivity and reproducibility of Proppian annotations, in: Mark A. Finlayson (ed.), The Third Workshop on Computational Models of Narrative, Cambridge MA 2012, pp. 17-21

 

R. Bod and M. Smets, 2012. Empiricist Solutions to Nativist Problems using Tree-Substitution Grammars, Proceedings Cognitive Models of Language Acquisition and Loss, EACL 2012, Avignon, France, pp. 10-18.

 

A. Zuccala and R. Bod, 2012. Book Reviews as 'Mega-Citations': A Fresh Look At Citation Theory, Proceedings 17th International Conference on Science and Technology Indicators, STI 2012, Montreal.

 

P. Pauwels and R. Bod, 2012. 'Applications for experimenting' or 'reasoning agents' as design decision support tools, Proceedings Design Computation and Cognition, DCC’2012.

 

R Bod, B. Löwe, S. Saraf, 2011. How much do formal narrative annotations differ? A Proppian case study, in The Computational Turn: Past, Presents, Futures?, pp. 242-245.

 

A. Honingh and R. Bod, 2011. Clustering and classification of music using interval categories, Proceedings MCM 2011, Paris.

 

A. Honingh and R. Bod, 2010. Pitch class set categories as analysis tools for degrees of tonality, Proceedings ISMIR 2010, Utrecht.

 

R. Gayler, S. Levy and R. Bod, 2010. Explanatory Aspirations and the Scandal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Proceedings BICA 2010, Washington D.C.

 

F. Sangati, W. Zuidema and R. Bod, 2010. Efficiently extracting recurring tree fragments from large treebanks, Proceedings LREC10.

 

F. Sangati, J. Zuidema and R. Bod, 2009. A Generative Re-ranking Models for Dependency Parsing, Proceedings IWPT 2009, Association for Computational Linguistics

 

R. Bod, G. Borensztajn and E. Morgan, 2009. Empiricist Solutions to Nativist Puzzles, Proceedings CogSci 2009, Cognitive Science Society.

 

G. Borensztajn, J. Zuidema and R. Bod, 2009. The Hierarchical Prediction Framework: Towards a Neural Theory of Grammar Acquisition. Proceedings CogSci 2009, Cognitive Science Society.

 

R. Bod, 2008. Rules and Exemplars in Language Acquisition, Proceedings CogSci 2008, Cognitive Science Society.

 

G. Borensztajn, J. Zuidema and R. Bod, 2008. Children's grammars grow more abstract with age - Evidence from an automatic procedure for identifying the productive units of language, Proceedings CogSci 2008, Cognitive Science Society. Best Paper Award in Applied Cognitive Modeling.

 

R. Bod, 2007. Is the End of Supervised Parsing in Sight? Proceedings ACL 2007, Prague, 400-407.

 

R. Bod, 2007. A Linguistic Investigation into U-DOP. Proceedings ACL 2007 Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Acquisition, Prague, 1-8.

 

R. Bod, 2007. Unsupervised Syntax-Based Machine Translation: The Contribution of Discontiguous Phrases. Proceedings MT Summit 2007, Copenhagen.

 

R. Bod and D. Cochran, 2007. Introduction to Exemplar-Based Models of Language Acquisition and Use. Proceedings ESSLLI workshop "Exemplar-Based Models of Language Acquisition and Use".

 

R. Bod, 2006. Unsupervised Parsing with U-DOP. Proceedings CONLL'2006, New York. 26-33.

 

R. Bod, 2006. An All-Subtrees Approach to Unsupervised Parsing. Proceedings ACL-COLING 2006, Sydney, 865-872.

 

R. Bod, 2006. Is There Evidence for a Probabilistic Language Faculty? Proceedings CogSci'2006, Vancouver, Canada.

 

R. Bod, 2005. Modeling Scientific Problem-Solving by DOP. Proceedings CogSci'2005, Stresa, Italy.

 

R. Bod, 2004. Exemplar-Based Models of Scientific Reasoning. Proceedings MBR'04, Pavia, Italy.

 

R. Bod, 2004. Exemplar-Based Explanation. Proceedings Computing and Philosophy (E-CAP'2004), Pavia, Italy.

 

R. Schaefer, J. Murre and R. Bod, 2004. Limits to Universality in Segmentation of Simple Melodies. Proceedings ICMPC8 (8th Int. Conf. on Music Perception and Cognition), Evanston, IL.130-134.

 

R. Bod, 2004. From Theory to Technology: Rules versus Exemplars. Proceedings PSA'04, Austin, TX.

 

R. Bod and A. Honingh, 2004. The Notion of Convexity in Music, Proceedings UCM'2004, Caserta, Italy. 81-90.

 

R. Bod, 2003. An Efficient Implementation of a New DOP Model. Proceedings European Chapter of ACL'03, Budapest, Hungary. 19-26.

 

R. Bod, 2003. Stochastic Analysis of Music. Proceedings UCM'2003, Caserta, Italy.

 

R. Bod, 2002. Combining Simplicity and Likelihood in Language and Music. Proceedings CogSci-2002, Fairfax, Virginia. 380-385.

R. Bod, 2001. What is the Minimal Set of Fragments that Achieves Maximal Parse Accuracy? Proceedings ACL'2001, Toulouse, France. 66-73.

R. Bod, 2001. Memory-Based Models of Music Analysis. Proceedings International Computer Music Conference 2001 (ICMC'01), Havana, Cuba. 189-196.

R. Bod, 2001. Stochastic Models of Melodic Analysis. Proceedings 14th Meeting of the Research Society on Foundations of Music Research, Ghent, Belgium. 1-16.

R. Bod, 2001. Probabilistic Grammars for Music. Proceedings BNAIC'2001, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. 37-46.

R. Bod, 2000. Combining Semantic and Syntactic Structure for Language Modeling in Speech Recognition. Proceedings ICSLP'2000, Beijing, China. 298-301.

R. Bod, 2000. An Improved Parser for Data-Oriented Lexical-Functional Analysis. Proceedings ACL'2000, Hong Kong, China. 61-68.

R. Bod, 2000. Parsing with the Shortest Derivation. Proceedings COLING'2000, Saarbrücken, Germany. 69-75.

R. Bod, 2000. An Empirical Evaluation of LFG-DOP. Proceedings COLING'2000, Saarbrücken, Germany. 62-68.

R. Bod and R. Scha, 1999. What are the Structural Units of Language Processing? Some Evidence from Data-Oriented Parsing. Proceedings International Conference on Cognitive Science 1999, Tokyo, Japan.

R. Bod, 1999. Extracting Stochastic Grammars from Treebanks. Proceedings ATALA Workshop, Paris, France. 40-51.

R. Bod, 1999. Using Treebanks for Grammar Learning. Proceedings VEXTAL'99 Conference, Venice, Italy. 13-22.

R. Bod and R. Kaplan, 1998. A Probabilistic Corpus-Driven Model for Lexical Functional Analysis. Proceedings ACL-COLING'98, Montreal, Canada. 145-151.

R. Bod, 1998. Spoken Dialogue Interpretation with the DOP model. Proceedings ACL-COLING'98, Montreal, Canada. 138-144.

R. Bod and R. Kaplan, 1998. Grammaticality, Robustness, and Specificity in a Probabilistic Approach to Lexical Functional Analysis. Proceedings LFG Conference and Workshops, Brisbane, Australia.

 

R. Bod, R. Bonnema and R. Scha, 1997. Data-Oriented Semantic Interpretation. Proceedings 2nd Int. Workshop on Computational Semantics, Tilburg, The Netherlands. 2-11.

R. Bonnema, R. Bod and R. Scha, 1997. A DOP Model for Semantic Interpretation. Proceedings ACL-EACL'97, Madrid, Spain. 159-167.

R. Bod, 1996. Two Questions about Data-Oriented Parsing. Proceedings Fourth Workshop on Very Large Corpora, COLING'96, Copenhagen, Denmark. 15-24.

R. Bod, R. Bonnema and R. Scha, 1996. A Data-Oriented Approach to Semantic Interpretation. Proceedings Workshop on Corpus-Oriented Semantic Analysis, ECAI-96, Budapest, Hungary. 44-53.

R. Bod, 1995. The Problem of Computing the Most Probable Tree in Data-Oriented Parsing and Stochastic Tree Grammars. Proceedings European Chapter of the ACL'95, Dublin, Ireland. 104-111.

K. Sima'an, R. Bod, R. Scha and S. Krauwer, 1994. Efficient Disambiguation by means of Stochastic Tree Substitution Grammars. Proceedings New Methods in Language Processing, UMIST, Manchester, UK. 9-18.

R. Bod and R. Scha, 1994. Prediction and Disambiguation by means of Data-Oriented Parsing. Proceedings Twente Workshop on Language Technology (TWLT8), Enschede, The Netherlands. 43-55.

M. van den Berg, R. Bod and R. Scha, 1994. A Corpus-Based Approach to Semantic Interpretation. Proceedings Ninth Amsterdam Colloquium, ILLC, The Netherlands. 141-159.

R. Bod, M. Dastani and R. Scha, 1993. Solving Proportional Analogies using Structural Information Theory. Proceedings European Workshop on Cased-based Reasoning, Kaiserslautern, Germany.

R. Bod, 1993. Using an Annotated Language Corpus as a Virtual Stochastic Grammar. Proceedings AAAI'93, AAAI Press, Menlo Park. 211-217.

R. Bod, 1993. Monte Carlo Parsing. Proceedings 3rd International Workshop on Parsing Technologies, Tilburg/Durbuy, The Netherlands/Belgium. 1-9.

R. Bod, 1993. Data Oriented Parsing as a General Framework for Stochastic Language Processing. Proceedings Twente Workshop on Language Technology (TWLT6), Twente, The Netherlands. 11-20.

R. Bod, 1993. Combining Structural and Statistical Information from an Annotated Corpus. Proceedings European Conference on Machine Learning (ECML'93), Vienna, Austria. 1-8.

R. Bod, 1993. Using an Annotated Corpus as a Stochastic Grammar. Proceedings European Chapter of the ACL'93, Utrecht, The Netherlands. 37-44.

R. Bod, 1992. A Computational Model of Language Performance: Data Oriented Parsing. Proceedings COLING'92, Nantes, France. 855-859.

R. Bod, 1992. Applying Monte Carlo Techniques to Data-Oriented Parsing. In W. Sijtsma and O. Zweekhorst (eds.) Computational Linguistics in the Netherlands 1992, CLIN, The Netherlands. 1-13.

R. Bod, 1991. A Computational Model of Language Performance: Data Oriented Parsing. In J. van Eijck and W. Meyer Viol (eds.) Computational Linguistics in the Netherlands 1991, CLIN, The Netherlands. 26-39.

 

Dissemination, Valorisation, Reviews, Popular Press and Other Publications (Selection)

R. Bod, 2018. “Voor persoonlijke begeleiding zijn 220 studenten te veel”, NRC Handelsblad, 19 maart 2018.

 

R. Bod, 2017. The Case for a History of the Humanities. The Chronicle Review, 24 February 2017.

 

R. Bod, 2017. Interacties tussen Alfa- en Bètawetenschap. Seminar aan het Ignatiusgymnasium, Amsterdam, 10 januari 2017.

 

R. Bod, 2016. Wiskunde en Geesteswetenschap. Lezing bij VOX-POP, Universiteit van Amsterdam, 8 december 2016.

 

R.  Bod 2016 (met Freek de Jonge). De Toekomst van de Geesteswetenschappen. Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, 7 april 2016.

 

R. Bod, 2016. Review of “What is the History of Knowledge?” by Peter Burke, History of Humanities 1(2).

 

R. Bod and B. Cornelissen, 2016. De Mythe van Zachte en Harde Wetenschap. Catalogus “Out of the Box”, Tentoonstelling Bijzonder Collecties, UvA.

 

R. Bod, 2015. Obituary Remko Scha. UvA-web and ILLC Magazine December 2015.

 

R. Bod, 2015. Master class over “Zachte Wetenschap, Harde Kennis”, Barlaeus Gymnasium, maart 2015.

 

R. Bod, 2015. Recensie van “Een Kleine Filosofie van het Wonder”, NRC Handelsblad, 26 juni 2015.

 

R. Bod, 2015. Laat het studieaanbod niet afhangen van grillige 18-jarigen. NRC Handelsblad, 7 maart 2015.

 

R. Bod, 2015. Interview NOS Journaal over teloorgang van kleine studies. http://nos.nl/uitzending/3582-uitzending.html

 

R. Bod, 2015. Laat studieaanbod niet afhangen toevallige interesse van 18-jarigen. NRC Next, 6 maart 2015.

 

R. Bod, 2014. Alfa omdat je niets anders kunt. NRC Handelsblad, 28 juni 2014.

 

R. Bod, 2014. Ook de alfastudent zelf is onder de maat. NRC Next, 28 juni 2014.

 

Discussie-artikel in De Groene Amsterdammer, De 10 Revoluties in de Geesteswetenschappen, 30 oktober 2013.

 

R. Bod, 2013. De Veelheid aan Geesteswetenschappelijke Methoden. En toch is er Eenheid!, De Filosoof, 60, 5-6.

 

R. Bod, 2013. De Ondernemende Alfa, Het Beste Idee van 2013, 268-270.

 

R. Bod, 2013. Een Geesteswetenschappelijke Revolutie?, Nederland in Ideeën, 127-130.

 

R. Bod, 2013. Wat zijn de geesteswetenschappen? Kennislink, 8 februari 2013.

 

R. Bod, 2013. Ondernemende alfa’s brengen stad tot bloei, Parool, 9 maart 2013.

 

R. Bod, H. Gzella, M. Norde, E. Crabbendam, J. Oosterwijk en L. Entjes, 2013. Stop de ondergang van de kleine talenopleidingen, NRC Handelsblad 29 januari 2013.

 

R. Bod, 2012. Er komt een digitale explosie van eruditie in de alfawetenschap, NRC Handelsblad, 15 december 2012.

 

R. Bod, 2012. Waarom vertaalcomputers nog niet perfect zijn. NOS journaal. http://nos.nl/op3/uitzending/5329-nos-op-3-15-november-2012.html

 

R. Bod, 2012. De alfa’s zijn vergeten hun nut te verdedigen. Volkskrant, 5 april 2012.

 

R. Bod, 2012. Zo verdwijnt de alfa uit de universiteit. NRC Handelsblad, 3 maart 2012.

 

R. Bod, 2011. Bod herleest Panini. Facultaire Nieuwsbrief GW, UvA, november 2011.

 

R. Bod, 2011. De geesteswetenschappen als luxeproduct? Hoe alfa’s de wereld hebben veranderd. Alumniblad UvA, november 2011.

 

R. Bod 2010. >60 articles and interviews in Elsevier, Volkskrant, NRC Handelsblad, Trouw, De Groene Amsterdammer, HUMAN, Hoe?Zo!, Babel and other newspapers, magazines, radio & tv programs on the book “The Forgotten Sciences” (“De Vergeten Wetenschappen”). Lecture tour: see http://devergetenwetenschappen.blogspot.com/.

 

R. Bod, 2010. Is there Progress in the Humanities? In R. Bod, J. Maat and T. Weststeijn (eds.), Abstract book of The Making of the Humanities, Second Int. Conf. On the History of the Humanities, Amsterdam.

R. Bod, 2010. Towards a World History of the Humanities: The Impact of China. In J. v. Benthem and F. Liu (eds.), Abstract book of The History of Logic in China, International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS).

R. Bod, 2008. “Iedereen kent Newton en Darwin, niemand Bopp en Panini”, NRC Handelsblad, 14 oktober 2008.

 

R. Bod, 2008. “Hé nerds, alfa’s hebben de wereld óók veranderd!”,  NRC Next, 13 oktober 2008.

 

R. Bod, 2008. Het Wetenschappelijk Werk als Kunstwerk, BLIND!, 11 januari 2008.

 

G. Borensztajn, J. Zuidema and R. Bod, 2008. Taalverwerving: De Wetenschap van de Kleine Wetenschapper, Kunst en Wetenschap, 17(4).

 

R. Bod, 2008. Formalization in the Humanities: From Valla to Scaliger. In R. Bod, J. Maat and T. Weststeijn (eds.), Abstract book of The Making of the Humanities, First Int. Conf. On the History of the Humanities, Amsterdam.

R. Bod, 2007. “Goed onderzoek, dan ook meer geld”, NRC Handelsblad, 7 juni 2007.

 

R. Bod, 2003. Particularism: A Maximalist View on Theory. Meeting Handbook LMPS'03, Oviedo, Spain.

 

R. Bod, J. Hay and S. Jannedy, 2003. Is There Evidence for a Probabilistic Language Faculty? Meeting Handbook LMPS'03, Oviedo, Spain.

 

R. Bod, 2003. What is Data-Oriented Parsing? Research focus article, ILLC annual report.

 

R. Bod, 2002. Minimalism vs. Maximalism in the Natural and Social Sciences. Proceedings Causation and Explanation in Natural and Social Sciences (CENSS-2002). Ghent, Belgium.

 

R. Bod, 2001. Probability Theory in Linguistics. Meeting Handbook LSA-2001, Washington D.C.

R. Bod, 2001. Using Natural Language Processing Techniques for Musical Parsing. Proceedings ACH/ALLC'2001, New York, NY.

R. Bod, 2001. Sentence Memory: Storage vs. Computation of Frequent Sentences. Proceedings CUNY-2001 Conference on Sentence Processing, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

R. Bod, 2000. The Storage and Computation of Frequent Sentences, Proceedings AMLAP'2000, Leiden, The Netherlands.

R. Bod, 2000. What are the Structural Units of Language Processing?, Meeting Handbook LSA-2000, Chicago, IL.

R. Bod and R. Scha, 1996. Data-Oriented Language Processing: An Overview. ILLC Research Report LP-96-13, Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. 34 pp.

R. Bod, 1996. An Annotation Convention for OVIS Dialogues, NWO Deliverable, Priority Programme Language and Speech Technology, The Hague. 39 pp.

R. Bod, 1996. Efficient Algorithms for Parsing the DOP Model? A Reply to Joshua Goodman, Computational Linguistics Archive. CMP-LG/9605031.

R. Bod, 1995. Enriching Linguistics with Statistics: Performance Models of Natural Language, Academische Pers, The Netherlands. (Ph.D. thesis)

R. Bod, S. Krauwer and K. Sima'an, 1994. CLASK: Combining Linguistic and Statistical Knowledge. ESF (European Science Foundation) Final Report, Research Institute for Language and Speech, Utrecht University, The Netherlands. 84 pp.

R. Bod and R. Scha, 1994. A Data-Oriented Approach to Natural Language Learning. Machine Learning of Natural Language and Speech, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

R. Bod, M. Dastani, H. Prüst, R. Scha and H. Zeevat (eds.), 1993. HCI from a Discourse Perspective, ESPRIT (Basic Research Action P6296), 92 pp.

R. Bod and R. Scha, 1993. Deriving Optimal Network Diagrams by means of Structural Information Theory. In R. Bod et al. (eds.), HCI from a Discourse Perspective, ESPRIT. 48-60.

R. Bod, 1992. Mathematical Properties of the Data-Oriented Parsing Model. Third Meeting of Mathematics of Language, Austin, Texas.

Many people consider me a Dutchman, though I lived for several years in Italy where I received excellent education not only in the exact sciences but also in the humanities. Despite much criticism on the Italian educational system, I think it is one of the best in the world. It gave me a humanist background on which I can still build today.

 

I've always known that I wanted to become a 'scientist', yet I did not always know in what science. At the age of 10, I was convinced to become an astronomer. I went to several astronomical summer-schools at a very young age, and published my first paper at the age of 15. For some time around the age of 16, I thought to become a philosopher, but then turned to astronomy again. I studied Astrophysics at the University of Utrecht, next moved to the University of Rome (La Sapienza) where I studied Letters and Mathematics. Finally, I thought that the real challenges lie in the field of Artificial Intelligence, in particular Computational Linguistics, which I studied in Amsterdam, where I also received my PhD. After having been at the University of Leeds, at Xerox PARC (as a consultant), I became full professor in Artificial Intelligence at the University of St Andrews in 2005, and a VICI-laureate at the University of Amsterdam in 2007 to which as I moved in 2008 as full professor in Computational and Digital Humanities. In 2017 I founded WOinActie, an action group that aims to achieve appropriate funding for Dutch universities. 

 

My main interests are in computational models of human cognition, in particular of language, music and reasoning, but I have also major interests in the history of science and humanities. I have worked for several years on the Data-Oriented Parsing model which learns how to process new input by combining fragments from previous input. This model creates rule-like behavior without rules, and has been applied to a variety of modalities, such as language, music, vision and reasoning.  During the last few years I also started to work on the history of the humanities, which turns out to be a goldmine when viewed from a comparative, worldwide perspective. There appears to be a unbroken tradition in the humanities from Antiquity onwards that can best be described as a quest for explanatory principles and empirical patterns (in linguistics, philology, art theory, music theory, historiography, etc). I published a full monograph on the longue durée history of the humanities of which the English translation appeared in 2013 with Oxford. I also edited several books in this field. In 2019, I published an even more ambitious monograph on the history of all knowledge disciplines from a multicentric perspective covering five different continents and six thousand years. I am currently recovering from the effort.

I live with Daniela. We wrote, together with our friend Sergio, a book on the architectural history of Amsterdam (my sole publication in Italian, apart from some translations of my favorite author Nescio into Italian). Besides having a good time with Daniela, my son Livio, my family members and my friends, one of the things I enjoy most, is, playing the piano and the theremin. I also enjoy chance photography and other aleatoric art. You can often see me walking around shopping malls with my camera randomly taking thousands of pictures.

 

On a more personal note, I am known as an extremely talkative person. Daniela once proposed that my first name "Rens" is an acronym for "Raramente E' Nel Silenzio", that is, "Rarely is he in silence".