Work with us

Four ways in

Most of what the unit has built started with somebody getting in touch — an archivist with a basement of registers nobody could use, a research group that needed a variable no existing dataset contained. If any of the four cases below describes you, write to Christian Møller Dahl at cmd@sam.sdu.dk.

If you hold an archive

We work with record-holders as partners, not as suppliers. In practice that means the institution keeps custody and control of its material, digitisation is planned around its own conservation and access rules, and the structured output comes back to it in a form it can serve to its own users. Our existing partnerships — the Danish National Archives, Statistics Denmark, the Copenhagen City Archives, The National Archives in the UK, the National Library of Norway, and SwedPop in Sweden — all work this way. The unit is also a partner in HisPeR, Denmark's historical population register.

What is most useful at a first conversation is not a proposal but a description: what the records are, roughly how many there are, what condition they are in, whether they are already imaged, and what you would want to be able to ask of them. We can usually say quickly whether a body of material is tractable, and equally quickly when it is not.

If you want to use our tools

OccCANINE, DARE and HANA are open, documented and free to use, with no permission needed. But historical sources are idiosyncratic, and the first run on unfamiliar material rarely goes cleanly — an unusual hand, a language the model has not seen, a table layout that breaks segmentation. We are genuinely interested in hearing where the tools fail, because that is where the next paper comes from.

If you use one of them in published work, please cite it. If you extend one, tell us and we will link to your version.

If you are thinking about a PhD

The unit suits people who want to do both halves of the work: build the method and then use the data to answer a question that matters. A background in econometrics, machine learning, economic history or historical demography can all work — what is harder to teach is the willingness to care about a source, so an applicant who has actually sat with archival material has an advantage.

PhD positions are advertised through the SDU Business School and The Faculty of Social Sciences PhD programme. Informal enquiries before a call opens are welcome and are the better route — it is much easier to shape a project together than to react to a finished proposal.

If you are planning a grant application

BDAD joins other groups' applications as the data-construction component: transcription, structuring, linkage, and the statistical treatment of the resulting measurement error. That has been the unit's role in projects funded by the AHRC, the Swedish Research Council, the Carlsberg Foundation and the Independent Research Fund Denmark.

The one thing worth knowing early is that digitisation costs are driven by page counts and conservation requirements, not by the interest of the question — so the sooner we can look at the actual material, the more reliable the budget line will be. Contact us well before the deadline.

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