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With their paper ‘Something Happened to the Future: Reconstructing Temporalities in Dutch Parliamentary Debate, 1814–2018’ assistant professor Pim Huijnen and professor Joris van Eijnatten won the , awarded each year to the best of digital history internationally. Pim Huijnen works at the UU History department and is one of the coordinators of the Text Mining SIG. Joris van Eijnatten is director of the NL eScience Center in Amsterdam and professor for digital history at the UU.

The judging panel agreed that, from a strong field of nominations, the ‘article was the standout piece.’ The award was a unanimous decision, with the judging panel recognising the paper’s contributions to historical knowledge, historiography, and method.

The article uses text mining methods to trace the different meanings attributed to ‘future’ in Dutch parliamentary records between 1814 and 2018. It makes the claim that the political conceptualization of the future changed radically from the 1980s onward. While past futures were never certain, they were relatively predictable. In the nineteenth century, people found comfort in the idea that the future lay in God’s hands. In the 1970s, they believed the future could be planned, or even predicted in the form of scenarios. However, from around the end of that decade the future became fundamentally unpredictable and risky -- something to be afraid of.

The IHR Digital History seminar in which the prize was awarded can be found here: .