Transforming historical research practices – a digital infrastructure for the VOC archives (GLOBALISE)

Abstract

The GLOBALISE project aims to unlock c. 5 million pages from the archives of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) for in-depth research. Funded by the Dutch Research Council 1 , GLOBALISE is a collaboration of the Huygens Institute, the International Institute of Social History and the Digital Infrastructure department of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Humanities Cluster; the Computational Linguistics & Text Mining Lab of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam; the CREATE research programme of the University of Amsterdam; and the Dutch National Archives. The project team consists of historians, computational linguists, data specialists and software developers. We expect to deliver a first prototype of the research infrastructure in early 2024; all tools and data will be open access available by the end of 2026. As all of this will be a large-scale undertaking, we invite researchers and the wider interested public to work with us, especially to provide data, help annotate or enrich the VOC materials. In return, they get early access to our data and tools. More information about contributing to GLOBALISE can be found on the project website: https://globalise.huygens.knaw.nl/ .

Reflections on Encoding Languages in Historical Data: Working With the Multilingual Dimension of the Dutch East India Company Archives

“…HTR transcriptions of the archive can then be linked to the corresponding information in the reference data (Petram & van Rossum 2022).…”