Arnoud Wils holds a PhD in Literary Studies and a degree in Classics from KU Leuven. His career has consistently been situated at the intersection of digital technology, literature, culture, and the humanities, in roles ranging from developer, data specialist, journalist, and media editor at the Flemish public broadcaster VRT to educational technologist and researcher at KU Leuven. Since 2023, he has been a Research Software Engineer and lecturer at The Plant, the digital laboratory of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Maastricht University. In this role, he supports students, PhD candidates, and researchers in integrating digital technologies into their work: setting up digital infrastructures, assisting with data collection and classification, extracting structured data from unstructured or messy sources, and processing and visualising the results, drawing on NLP and large language models where appropriate.
His research interests developed from a 2022 pilot project, in which he built a reading environment for Ancient Greek based on the visualisation of XML data from dependency treebanks. More recently, he has focused on LLMs and AI for the analysis of large text corpora and on the integration of OCR and HTR technologies. A recurring ambition across these projects is to turn seemingly dry data from art and library catalogues into visually compelling, interactive narratives. A further strand of his work concerns digital preservation through sustainable web technologies. In 2026 he was awarded a four-week research fellowship at the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities to develop this expertise further. Arnoud also works as a guest lecturer, sharing his insights on the inner workings of AI and its potential and limitations with both students and academics. From 2026 to 2028, he coordinates a work package of the ATLAS Erasmus+ project on AI in higher education.