Who is Folgert Karsdorp and what does he research?

Folgert Karsdorp is a researcher and the head of the Ethnology, Everyday Culture & Society (EECS) department at the Meertens Institute, part of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also Professor of Computational Methods for the Study of Cultural Change at Utrecht University. His research examines how culture spreads, develops, and disappears, using computational and quantitative methods drawn from ecology, population genetics, and machine learning.

What karsdorp.io is

karsdorp.io is the personal academic site of Folgert Karsdorp, titled "Fragments of Cultural Change." It presents his research profile and a selection of his publications, with a link through to a full publications list. It is a researcher's own site rather than a journal, institution, or software project, so the material on it reflects his work and interests directly.

Research focus

Karsdorp's work sits at the intersection of cultural evolution and computational methods. Two themes stand out in his own description:

• How culture spreads, develops, and disappears — questions about the transmission and survival of cultural material over time.
• Methodological challenges in historical data — in particular, analyzing biased historical collections and measuring cultural diversity and loss.

The methods he draws on come from outside the humanities as much as within it: ecology, population genetics, and machine learning. That combination is characteristic of computational approaches to cultural change, where models developed for biological populations are adapted to cultural ones.

Selected publications

The site lists a set of representative papers, each pointing to a specific problem in the field:

The titles show the through-line of his research. "Forgotten Books" applies unseen species models — a tool from ecology for estimating how many species exist but were not observed — to estimate how much cultural material has been lost rather than preserved. "Correcting collection bias" addresses the same underlying problem from the other direction: historical archives and collections are not neutral samples, and comparative studies of diversity need to account for what was collected and what was not. "Saved in Translation?" extends this to estimating diversity shared by historic cultures, using medieval literature in French and Dutch as a case.

Why the site is useful

If you want to understand computational approaches to cultural evolution, karsdorp.io is a compact entry point: it states the research program in a few sentences and links the key papers that carry it out. The publications are the substantive content — the site itself is a profile and index, not a repository of datasets or tools. For anyone following the use of ecological and genetic models in the study of culture, the listed papers are the place to start.