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The past three decades have seen several waves of interest in developing crossovers between academic research and computing; molecular biology is often cited as the prime exemplar of "what computation can do for a field". The humanities and social sciences have also been the terrain of such interactions,at times through bottom-up collaborations, and at times through concerted policy-driven efforts (Wouters and Beaulieu 2006). The main developments vary across national contexts and disciplines. In our local context (in the Netherlands), we can roughly identify the following waves: the "history and computing" and "literature and computing" efforts of the 1970s and 1980s;the collaboratory and infrastructure discussions of the last decade; the current efforts at developing computational humanities, and recent emphasis on virtual research environments (VREs) of which Alfalab¹ can be regarded as an example.

DOI: 10.1057/9780230371934_15

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