With the Macroscope the Netherlands is developing a new perspective on social and cultural change

How do stories influence the way people see each other, and how have these stories changed over time? Why do some communities remain cohesive, while others disintegrate? And what ensures that trust grows, flourishes, or fades in an age of constant information? The Macroscope should shed light on this. This newly developed population-level research infrastructure will help researchers observe and understand how societies develop over time.

The Macroscope is a newly developed research infrastructure that will enable researchers to observe and understand how societies develop. Using the Macroscope, researchers can securely link and analyze datasets from social, cultural, and digital domains across the entire Dutch population.

Broad cooperation

The project unites 14 Dutch universities with leading institutes, including Statistics Netherlands (CBS), the National Library (KB), the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (B&G), Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal (INT) and the KNAW Humanities Cluster. The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) is allocating €16,8 million to the project. The consortium contributes another €4 million to the project.

‘The Macroscope is an extraordinary meeting point between the social sciences and the humanities,” said Prof. Susan Aasman (University of Groningen), from the Faculty of Arts, Co-Principal Investigator and a key driving force behind the project. ‘It allows us to zoom in and out—to see how our language, culture, and institutions shift over time, and how people’s everyday choices shape those transformations.’

The Macroscope is composed of four interconnected elements:

1. Secure data vaults, where sensitive information is stored and protected;

2. Unified data sources, combining surveys, archives, and digital records;

3. AI tools, developed and evaluated to assist research;

4. A public access portal, enabling both scholars and citizens to engage with findings.

Seeing crucial connections

For researchers like Nathalie Fridzema at the University of Groningen, who studies the early history of the web, combining various data sources and applying AI tools is particularly significant. ‘Studying contemporary media involves navigating transmedial events in various overlapping databases, media types, search systems, and levels of accessibility. The Macroscope helps me to manage this complexity.’

The Macroscope unites the strengths of ODISSEI (the national infrastructure for social and economic data) and CLARIAH-NL (the national infrastructure for the Arts and the Humanities). By 2030, the Macroscope will serve as a common good for the Dutch research community—a bridge across disciplines, from sociology to communication science, from linguistics to data science, and from media studies to history.

Click here for the CLARIAH-NL press release.