COIn grant enables Leiden researchers to improve their research infrastructure.
The COIn grants enable researchers to improve the infrastructure for their research. The initiators of two projects explain how the grant has helped them.
Mehmet Kentel and Alp Yenen now have access to Muteferriqa.
Assistant professors Mehmet Kentel and Alp Yenen are using the COIn grant to gain access to Muteferriqa, an online search portal for Ottoman periodicals and books.
Access to Ottoman sources has historically posed major challenges’, the researchers state. ‘Earlier generations struggled with limited archival access. Since the mid-2000s, however, the improvements of the Ottoman Archives has transformed the field, enabling scholars to study Ottoman administration across a vast geography, from Algeria to Azerbaijan, and from the Adriatic to Arabia, over several centuries. At the same time, this archival turn has reinforced a predominantly state-centric perspective. Ottoman periodicals, highly influential from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1920s, have been particularly difficult to access and use, and largely neglected. Scattered across libraries, archives, and private collections in different countries, they traditionally required page-by-page skimming and, therefore, more advanced language skills. Recent digitization initiatives have begun to change this. Through this development, we discovered Muteferriqa, an online discovery portal for Ottoman periodicals and books, which brings together several majorcollections and provide advanced search capabilities. To secure access to this remarkable database, we applied for the COIn Grant, which specifically supports research infrastructure projects.
We have used the grant to secure three-year access to the platform. This access is not limited to our own use, but rather available to all members of Leiden University, including students. In order to increase awareness of this infrastructure among the LU research community, we organized an online training session, during which representatives of Muteferriqa showed how to use the platform effectively. We plan to organize another online meeting in Spring 2026, and in Fall 2026, we aim to organize a workshop with other LU researchers that will highlight how the infrastructure facilitates research in late Ottoman and Middle Eastern histories. We hope that there will be a substantive interest to this database shown by the wider LU community so that after these 3 years, the university will continue to provide access to it.’
Victoria Nyst can now automatically analyze hand gestures
At the HANDS!Lab for Sign Languages and Deaf Studies, deaf and hearing scientists conduct research into the sign languages of deaf communities. Nyst and co-applicant Peter van der Putten (LIACS) have been working together for years in the field of automatic gesture recognition. The COIn grant enables them to set up a portable Motion Capture Lab, which allows them to record how people move off the grid, in real time. The big bonus is that this toolkit automatically performs a 3D analysis of a gesture.
One of the projects for which the Leiden Mobile MoCap Lab will be used is that of postdoc Adrien Dadone, who is researching the gestures that were used for centuries throughout Europe in Benedictine monasteries, where speaking was not allowed during (part of) the day. From the 11th century onwards, monasteries compiled lists of gestures, making it possible to determine the extent to which these monastic gestures resemble each other and contemporary sign languages. ‘We know that there is overlap in these gestures from different languages and places, but until now it has been difficult to compare them properly: some lists are written in Latin, others in Old English,’ explains Nyst. ‘In addition, all gestures found must be visualised in order to compare them, which requires a great deal of time and knowledge on the part of the researcher.’
Automation and analysis
The COIn grant facilitates this process. Nyst: ‘Once LIACS students (via LUdev) have developed the toolkit that allows you to conduct motion research in an accessible way, we will be able to automatically compare the gestures found with those of all kinds of other gestures, thanks to the PhD research of (now postdoc) Manolis Fragkiadakis. The research of Nargess Asghari (Signs on Paper) and guest PhD student Lisa Lepp Lisa Lepp (Machine translation and co-creation) can also be linked together using the new technology, as can the large datasets of West African sign languages and the lexical database (Leiden SignBank) currently under construction.
Creative project
In addition, the grant offers LUdev students the opportunity to carry out a creative project. ‘In addition to the specific issue of monastic gestures, we offer them the opportunity to experiment with the technology,’ explains Nyst. ‘For example, they link music to gestures. If you stretch out your right arm, you hear a bass tone. Your left arm? Something higher. In this way, you could generate the appropriate music based on a dance.'
About the COIn grant
This grant of €5,000 to €30,000 is intended to improve research infrastructure, for example by purchasing software licences, applications, electronics or laboratory equipment. More information about eligibility can be found on this page.