Our two years long project, Alfalab, had its grand finale last week, at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) headquarters in Amsterdam.

Symposium The Future of Humanities: eHumanities in Practice presented key results of the Alfalab project team, and pointed at future directions of the recently established eHumanities Group of the KNAW. The symposium also provided an opportunity for discussing broader developments in digital and computational humanities.

Joris van Zundert, the Alfalab project manager, focused on epistemological, technological, administrative and other lessons learned in the process of developing Alfalab, while Alfalab team members presented tools, publications, portals and other outputs of the Alfalab labs and initiatives – TextLab, LifeLab, GeoLab, InterfaceLab, Linked Open Annotation, Enhanced On Line Publications, and Alfalab portal.

In addition to Alfalab team members, the symposium also included three invited speakers: Travis Brown, from the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, who presented project Bamboo; Annamaria Carusi of the Oxford e-Research Centre, who talked about re-engaging humanities theory in transformational digital humanities, and; Erik Schultes of Leiden University Medical Centre, who presented the concept and functions of nanopublications.

Finally, KNAW’s Henk Wals, Sally Wyatt, and Theo Mulder addressed the RoyalAcademy’s strategy in the field of digital and computational humanities.