Each year the Artes Research team offers the opportunity for students to do an internship with our team. During spring 2025, Helin Toprak, a student in the Advanced Master in Digital Humanities, joined us.
The Artes Research team frequently (co-)organizes training opportunities and collects training resources for researchers at the Faculty of Arts. Helin’s internship focused on this aspect of our work. During her three months with us, she developed resources on a variety of tools we find useful for our researchers. Helin created tutorials showcasing the functionalities of OpenRefine, and two Knight Lab tools, Timeline JS, and StoryMap JS.
OpenRefine is a tool that is useful for nearly all researchers who work with structured data and computational methods. An aspect of the research data workflow that is crucial in the beginning stages is data cleaning and transformation. OpenRefine is a free open-source web-based tool that allows users to do just that. During her internship, Helin created a tutorial to help researchers get started with this tool. The tutorial is designed for users who have no experience with OpenRefine and are looking to learn about the features and explore its uses.
The other two resources that Helin created focus on two tools from the Knight Lab suite. Timeline JS is an open-source tool developed to help users create interactive timelines. This is an accessible tool that anyone can use. The web-based tool just requires data that users put into a Google spreadsheet, then it’s ready to go with multiple options for customization. Advanced features allow those with more expertise to use their JSON skills to further customize their output.
StoryMap JS is also a free web-based tool developed by Knight Lab. This tool is designed to be highly visual. Users can add images and text to maps, allowing them to create a story or illustrate certain events or situations that might be relevant to their research topics. This tool is equally as accessible as Timeline JS and can be customized to fit a researcher’s needs and style.
To learn about these two tools as well as OpenRefine, you can have a look at the resources that Helin created during her internship. They are accessible via the following Zenodo record (make sure to look through all the documents in the record for each separate resource):
- Toprak, H. R. (2025, July 16). Materials for KU Leuven Libraries – Artes Research. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15982530
We would like to thank Helin for her great work during her internship! She was a pleasure to have as an intern, and we wish her all the best in her career after graduating from the Advanced Master in Digital Humanities!
