I’m a researcher working on Computational Humanities and Cultural Evolution at the Meertens Institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (Amsterdam, the Netherlands).

My research focuses on why some cultural phenomena are adopted and persist through time, while others change or disappear. Additionally, I’m interested in measuring cultural diversity and compositional complexity, and how we can account for biases in our estimations of diversity and complexity. To do that, I use computational models from Machine Learning, Cultural Evolution, and Ecology.

Besides cultural change and diversity, I’m also interested in teaching about computer programming in the context of the Humanities. I published a text book with Princeton University Press about using Python for Humanities data analysis. Check out the open access edition here!

Find me on , , , and see my CV .

Notebooks bias chao1 diversity emacs FAD folktales functional gtd heterogeneity hill-numbers history homogeneity jupyter loss org-mode pymc3 python regression replacement richness sampling semantics shakespeare shared-richness similarity turing unseen-species voc zelterman
Featured Publications

For a complete list of publications, see my CV.