The Macroscope is a collaborative initiative by ODISSEI and CLARIAH, and is being coordinated by the Erasmus University Rotterdam. The Macroscope project unites 14 Dutch universities with leading institutes, including Statistics Netherlands (CBS), Centerdata, SURF, the Netherlands eScience Center, the Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal, the National Library (KB), the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (B&G), the KNAW Humanities Cluster, and DANS. The project aims to develop the world’s first population-level research infrastructure, enabling researchers to securely link and analyse massive datasets spanning social, cultural and digital domains across the entire Dutch population.
The prevalence of individualised and isolated data in the Social Sciences and Humanities complicates large scale and collaborative research on social dynamics, interdependencies, and networks at population level. To address this, the Macroscope is initiated by two existing Dutch research infrastructures: ODISSEI, focused on social science and economic data, and CLARIAH, which houses cultural and linguistic archives. Together they provide centralised and secure access to a large variety of datasets.
The Macroscope consists of four integrated components: secure data vaults; unified data sources combining survey and archival materials; AI tools developed and evaluated for research; and a public access portal for researchers and citizens alike. These developments ensure the protection of sensitive data while allowing researchers to link and analyse large datasets spanning various domains in the Social Sciences and Humanities.
DANS is pleased to contribute to the further development of the infrastructure in the Macroscope project. Within the Macroscope, DANS aims to further develop the search infrastructure available for discovering existing datasets within the ODISSEI Portal as well as the DANS Data Station SSH.
For more information visit the website of ODISSEI, CLARIAH and the Erasmus University Rotterdam.
