Lara is a Digital Art Historian combining a Master in Art History MA and a Master after Master in Digital Humanities MSc with a profound interest in Information Technology specialized in image analysis of digital reproductions of art pieces, linked open data, querying of cultural APIs and data analytics and visualization of data.
Lara Peeters is currently employed at Ghent University as a technical scientific collaborator helping scientist with the use of the High Performance Computer at Ghent University.
More information can be found at Vlaams Supercomputer Center at HPC at Ghent University.
During my research in Art History I came across an article of Alan Marquand (1853-1924), an art historian at Princeton University, which was published in 2016. The article, On the scientific method in the study of art, included a mathematical and algoritmic approach to the study of art. And it let me on a path to approach the study of art in a new way and which let me to my current job position.
I started using and developing image analysis tools and algorithms in python and javascript which assisted me in my research of color in art. Thank to my degree in Digital Humanities I was able to develop the skills that I learned along the way during my research even further. This gave me the confidence to apply for my current position where I assist researchers form a huge array of fields who are also using computers in their own research.
Through my current position I have grown even more as a developper and my knowlege of software and how to manage it has grown exponentially. Through my job I became an active contributor of the open source software projects EESSI and EasyBuild. Which aid HPC sites and scientists with their software needs.
If you would like to learn more about EESSI and EasyBuild, Please check the documentation. EESSI is funded via participation in the EuroHPC Centre-of-Excellence MultiXscale, Please visit the website.
Lara Peeters recently won the AI for culture hackaton together with Francesco Gavioli and Zita Baronnet. The hackaton and our work was highlighted on the Europeana website. To take a look at our project please visit our GitHub repository.
Lara Peeters has expertise in python, JavaScript, postgreSQL, HTML, CSS, linked open data.
If you are working in the humanities and looking for tips or help with your project, someone to manage your data, set up a website and much more. Please do not hesitate to contact me on the e-mail address lara@edba.be or contact me via LinkedIn.
This website is a result of her master theses in both degrees. The project started from a fork of the open source palette extractor of google which would not only find prominent colors but also looked at the presence of their complementary colors. Lara learned Java Script in just a few weeks to understand the original code and to adjust it. For her master in Digital humanities she would expand on this forked application and build websites around it with parts of her research in art history. The website is a flask application build with python. The underlying data of the web application is managed in postgreSQL database. The website also relies on external data from museums available through an API connection. The Search function on the website is supported by an elasticsearch server.