NWO Funds the Macroscope: Building a New Lens on Culture and 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? With €16.8 million in funding from the Dutch Research Council (NWO), a national consortium of universities and research institutes will build the world’s first Macroscope. This groundbreaking research infrastructure is designed to help scientists observe and understand how societies evolve over time. Susan Aasman, Professor of Digital Humanities at the University of Groningen, will be acting as Co-PI on this project.

The Macroscope will provide researchers with a secure and ethical way to link and analyse large-scale datasets across social, cultural, and digital domains. It aims to reveal the dynamics that shape societies how trust develops, how culture changes, and how communities respond to an ever-shifting flow of information.

By bringing together the strengths of ODISSEI (the national infrastructure for social and economic data) and CLARIAH-NL (the national infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities), the Macroscope will create a living, ethical, and secure observatory of Dutch society—one that captures both data and the human stories behind it.

dr. Tom Emery, Executive Director of ODISSEI:

“Just as the microscope revealed the hidden world of cells, the Macroscope will reveal the hidden dynamics of societies. It will allow us to trace how ideas, languages, and inequalities flow across communities—safely, ethically, and collaboratively.”

prof. dr. Susan Aasman, Chair of CLARIAH-NL, adds:

“The Macroscope is an extraordinary meeting point between the social sciences and the humanities. 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.”

By 2030, the Macroscope will serve as a common good for the Dutch research community—a bridge across disciplines, from sociology and linguistics to data science, media studies, and history. 

Partners

The Macroscope brings together 14 Dutch universities with leading research institutes, including Statistics Netherlands (CBS), Centerdata, SURF, the Netherlands eScience Center, the Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal, DANS, the National Library (KB), the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (B&G), and the KNAW Humanities Cluster.

Read more here.