Alex Brandsen
Postdoc
- Name
- Dr. A. Brandsen
- Telephone
- +31 71 527 2727
- a.brandsen@arch.leidenuniv.nl
- ORCID iD
- 0000-0003-1623-1340
Alex Brandsen is a Postdoc researcher in Digital Archaeology at the Faculty of Archaeology.
More information about Alex Brandsen
News
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New excavation robot shapes future of archaeology -
Alex Brandsen and Bjørn Peare Bartholdy interviewed on Digital Scholarship Blog -
Researcher develops Google for archaeologists -
NWO subsidy for archaeological search engine: ‘There is no physical digging involved!’ -
Digital archaeologist Alex Brandsen featured in Artificial Intelligence dossier
-
More powerful data centre will accelerate research -
Working from home as an Archaeologist: 'As far as I know, no one has ever explored my living room for lost cities' -
Archaeology thanks to computer-based research -
444 Interdisciplinary Activity Grant for Alex Brandsen and Wouter Verschoof-van der Vaart -
Building an excavation report search engine with a Digital Humanities grant -
'Data science enables us to develop new tools'
PhD supervisor
See also
Office days
Monday, Wednesday, and Friday
Research
Alex’ research interests lie at the intersection of Archaeology and Computer Science, with a specific passion for creating useful tools for other archaeologists to further their research. In his Postdoc project, he is using text mining techniques and machine learning to unlock the information hidden in archaeological texts in multiple languages. This will result in an online tool allowing researchers to search through this enormous amount of literature in a detailed and fine grained matter.
Teaching activities
Alex enjoys teaching, and has been involved in several courses both at the faculty of Archaeology and LIACS, teaching subjects from databases to machine learning.
Curriculum vitae
Alex Brandsen graduated in Archaeology (BA, Leiden, 2009) and Archaeological Information Systems (MSc, York, 2010). During his time in Leiden and York, he developed a strong interest in developing online systems in archaeology. This culminated in his MSc thesis, in which he developed an online GIS system to view, draw and annotate medieval graffiti on a wall in the York Minster. After having worked in web development for 7 years in the UK, he has returned to the Faculty of Archaeology in 2017 as a PhD candidate in Digital Archaeology. In 2021, he started his Postdoc in the EXALT project.
Postdoc
- Faculteit Archeologie
- Archaeological Sciences
- Digital Archaeology
- Tenzer M., Pistilli G., Brandsen A. & Shenfield A. (2024), Debating AI in archaeology: applications, implications, and ethical considerations. SocArXiv. [other].
- Brandsen A (2024), Archaeology specific BERT models for English, German, and Dutch . Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology (CAA) 3 April 2023 - 6 September 2024. PCI Archaeology: Sidestone Press.
- Brandsen A. (2023), Information extraction and machine learning for archaeological texts. In: Gonzalez-Perez C., Martin-Rodilla P. & Pereira-Fariña M. (Eds.), Discourse and argumentation in archaeology: conceptual and computational approaches. Quantitative Archaeology and Archaeological Modelling. Cham: Springer. 229-261.
- Brandsen A. (15 February 2022), Digging in documents: using text mining to access the hidden knowledge in Dutch archaeological excavation reports (Dissertatie, Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University). Supervisor(s) and Co-supervisor(s): Lambers K. & Kolen J.C.A., Verberne S.
- Brandsen A., Verberne S., Lambers K & Wansleeben M. (2022), Can BERT dig it? Named entity recognition for information retrieval in the archaeology domain, Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage 15(3): 1-18.
- Brandsen A., Verberne S., Lambers K. & Wansleeben M. (2021), Usability evaluation for online professional search in the Dutch archaeology domain. arXiv. Leiden: Leiden University.
- Brandsen A. & Koole M. (2021), Labelling the past: data set creation and multi-label classification of Dutch archaeological excavation reports, Language Resources and Evaluation : .
- Brandsen A. & Koole M. (2021), Labelling the past: data set creation and multi-label classification of Dutch archaeological excavation reports, Language Resources and Evaluation : .
- Brandsen A. & Lippok F.E. (2021), A burning question: using an intelligent grey literature search engine to change our views on early medieval burial practices in the Netherlands, Journal of Archaeological Science 133: 105456.
- Brandsen A., Verberne S., Lambers K. & Wansleeben M. (2020), Creating a Dataset for Named Entity Recognition in the Archaeology Domain. Calzolari N., Béchet F., Blache P., Choukri K., Cieri C., Declerck T., Goggi S., Isahara H., Maegaard B., Mariani J., Mazo H., Moreno A., Odijk J. & Piperidis S. (Eds.), Conference Proceedings LREC 2020. The 12th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC) 2020 11 May 2020 - 16 May 2020. Marseilles: The European Language Resources Association. 4573–4577.
- Brandsen A., Lambers K., Verberne S. & Wansleeben M. (2019), User Requirement Solicitation for an Information Retrieval System Applied to Dutch Grey Literature in the Archaeology Domain, Journal of Computer Applications in Archaeology 2(1): 21-30.
- Brandsen A., Verberne S. & Wansleeben M. (2018), Named Entity Recognition in Dutch Archaeological Research Reports. Computational Linguistics in the Netherlands (CLIN) 28, Nijmegen. 26 January 2018 - 26 January 2018. [conference poster].
- Brandsen A. (2018), Digging in documents – using text mining to unlock the hidden knowledge in Dutch archaeological reports, Tijdschrift voor Mediterrane Archeologie 59: 56.
- Brandsen A., DIR2018. [web article].
- Paijmans J.J. & Brandsen A. (2010), Searching in archaeological texts: Problems and solutions using an artificial intelligence approach, PalArch's Journal of Archaeology of Egypt / Egyptology 7(2): 1-6.
- Teaching