Recent content in About on Bas Ernst
On Saturday 28 March 2026 I attended the graduation ceremony of the Open University at the Barbican Centre in London, an absolutely brilliant event and a memorable way to celebrate with my biggest supporters the conclusion of an eight-year journey studying part-time towards a BSc in Computing and IT. I have always enjoyed learning, ever since I was a child, and that curiosity helped me through the…
I will once again work with the small dataset I used for my previous post. However, this time I will not use Calc or Excel, but a graph database. Of course, for this tiny dataset, using this tool could be considered overkill. However, as I plan to add more projects and countries to the analysis in future iterations, the advantages of a graph-based database will become clearer. Since it is well…
In my previous post I mentioned using a graph database to store data from a small cultural diplomacy database. This would be most useful considering partners and projects as a network. The example data that I am using here is rather small, but eventually I can add more data and this type of database will become more usefull. Intuitively a graph database is easier to visualise mentally than a…
There are many definitions about cultural diplomacy. I profer to consider my work as a pracitce through which states and/or international organisations pursue foreign policy objectives. There exists many approaches how to implement cultural diplomacy. In this field measuring results and impacts is often considered problematic. There is still a common perception that cultural projects cannot be…
Making evaluations of cultural projects easy In general, those working in cultural diplomacy tend to focus on making projects happen. Collecting and analysing data for monitoring and evaluation purposes is often seen as a challenge. A lack of time, limited expertise, or simply a lack of priority can all stand in the way. However, with relatively little effort, it is possible to gather basic…
Analysing Gender and Diplomacy using Neo4j and Pandas In December 2025, I completed my BSc in Computing and IT at the Open University in the UK. For my final project, I deliberately chose a topic that connects my interest in data analysis with my professional field, diplomacy. My final research project focused on gender and diplomacy. In summer 2024, I discovered the GenDip dataset developed by…