Intern

Victor de Munck graduated from Leiden University in the Netherlands in 2026 with a B.A. in Data Science & Artificial Intelligence and a minor in Chinese Society. His interests lie at the intersection of his studies and anthropology- specifically, how AI can be used to study and understand culture.

Victor took a more human-centered approach in writing his thesis under his supervisor, a researcher in the computational creativity field. The thesis examines how prior creative artifacts shape subsequent ones, and how different conventions for storing old artifacts — functioning much like distinct cultures — constrain the way future artifacts evolve. He revealed that creativity can accumulate without any storage, as the culture is stored implicitly in the society and can be communicated through the individuals themselves. Though the idea exists in anthropology, Victor’s work shows that the property can emerge in simulations too. Working with these simulations is where the connection between culture and AI became explicit for him, and he has since been exploring how culture might be represented computationally and whether doing so is useful. A separate cross-cultural research project on courtship practices brought him into contact with HRAF and its data, where questions about how ethnographic material is stored and presented raised a further set of problems about how AI might contribute to the study of culture at a structural level.

At HRAF, Victor hopes to encounter a wider range of perspectives on culture and understand how cultures can be compared. As his thesis compared abstract cultures working with real data should help ground his early intuitions in how anthropology is actually done. Longer term, he aims to develop the work begun in his thesis and to contribute to the data science behind ethnographic databases starting with the ones in HRAF.