The granted projects:

True Colours: Hand-Coloured Books and the Global Imagination in the Early Modern Low Countries
Trude Dijkstra

This project explores how early modern books about the non-European world were hand-coloured in the Dutch Republic, revealing how visual practices shaped knowledge production and perceptions. Thousands of books were coloured after printing - by publishers, artists, or readers themselves - but when and why was this done? Using non-invasive pigment analyses (FORS and MAXRF), the project links the timing of interventions to discourses on skin tone, flora, and visual conventions. Focusing on Dutch collections, it shows that colour not only enhanced illustrations but actively shaped early modern visual knowledge production, offering new insight into how colour informs historical imagination.

Learning to Vary: Scrutinising the Sociolinguistic Sensitivity of Large Language Models
Viktorija Kostadinova

Large Language Models excel at producing grammatically fluent text, but it remains unclear whether they can generate socially meaningful variation, which is central to human communication. This project investigates whether LLMs show sociolinguistic sensitivity: the capacity to adjust language when primed with different social contexts. It will develop new techniques for probing models and establish a framework for analyzing LLM output. By examining how and when LLMs reproduce variation in dialect, register, and stance, the project aims to assess their ability to accurately replicate human-like variation and lay the foundation for a sociolinguistic research program on the sociolinguistic sensitivity of LLMs

Terraforming from Above: Digital Methods for Colonial Aerial Photography
Thomas Smits

Between 1920-1949, Dutch pilots photographed Indonesia from above, capturing the colonial landscape in unprecedented detail. This project uses AI to systematically analyse terraforming: the sweeping transformation of the Indonesian landscape. Examining aerial photography at scale reveals not only plantations, mines and infrastructure but also persistence, adaptation and resistance by indigenous communities. By turning these tools of territorial control into sources of historical understanding, the project uncovers the complex realities of environmental transformation under colonialism. The digital method can be widely applied to similar photograph collections worldwide, offering new ways to study how colonialism reshaped environments across the Global South.