Big data is not only complex to work with because there may be a lot of data points, but also because each data point can be multifaceted and thus complex to model and query. This is especially true for cultural heritage datasets that deal with objects whose meaning has changed over time and whose position in heritage collections has a complex relationship with the real world. In this talk, I will discuss how the Digital Humanities Research Lab is developing and working with advanced data models for cultural heritage collections in various interdisciplinary collaborations. Marieke van Erp is a Language Technology and Semantic Web expert with a penchant for interdisciplinary research. She holds a PhD in computational linguistics from Tilburg University (2010). She leads the Digital Humanities Research Lab at KNAW Humanities Cluster (Amsterdam) and is a co-founder and scienti c co-director of the Cultural AI Lab, a collaboration between various heritage and research institutes in the Netherlands. The Cultural AI Lab is aimed at developing socio-technological AI systems that are implicitly or explicitly aware of the subtle and subjective complexity of human culture. Dr. Van Erp's work spans many di erent domains, from olfactory, socio-economic, and maritime history to data journalism and cultural heritage but is always driven by language understanding and knowledge representation.