And it was worth the wait.
While TRIFECTA PI Marieke and senior researcher Ulbe Bosma at the International Institute of Social History (IISG) had already spotted synergies during the writing stage of his SevenFrontiers ERC Advanced Grant proposal, things really reached the next level when in October 2025, our new PhD student, Izzie He, jointly supervised by Marieke and Ulbe, joined both research teams.
On February 26th, 2026, we held our first joint meeting with members from both teams at IISG.
Getting to Know Each Other
We started with introductions where everyone shared their background, current research focus, and the challenges they face in their daily work.
Then Izzie, Gauri, and our SevenFrontiers colleague Merel Blok had prepared a cardboard tree with eight challenge themes on each side: Data Access, Data Quality, Interpersonal Collaboration, Specific Focus versus General Relevance, Interdisciplinary Methods, Multilingual Corpora, Technical Skill Sets, and Research Contribution. TRIFECTA team members got yellow sticky notes, while SevenFrontiers members got blue ones. We walked around and stuck our notes under the themes we identified with, then sat down in mixed groups of three to four people to discuss what we’d marked, overseen by the cardboard tree, the slightly dystopian nature of which was not lost on us.
Then, we were given beautiful decks of cards with research-oriented prompts prepared by our colleague and TRIFECTA visiting researcher, Chris Groenveld. These cards were great at helping us break the ice. We discussed prompt questions such as “I’m secretly envious of researchers from discipline X because they get to …”. Most importantly, we got to know each other in this less formal session, which is an important first step in paving the way for future collaborations.
What We Learned
- TRIFECTA can reuse primary data Collected by SevenFrontiers – double win for data access challenges
- SevenFrontiers gets to benefit from TRIFECTA’s digital methods expertise (hello, network analysis of merchant houses)
- SevenFrontiers historians can help contextualise TRIFECTA’s findings in historical research
Following the last point, Jiaqi was invited to present her most recent research on semantic change to the SevenFrontiers team in early April.
The Afterparty
We opened the doors for public presentations by SevenFrontiers’ student assistants, then celebrated with drinks and bites, including excellent seaweed crackers.