GLOBALISE
Unlocking the history of early globalisation and colonialism for researchers and the general public
Welcome to GLOBALISE, a project committed to enhancing the accessibility and research potential of the UNESCO Memory of the World-listed Dutch East India Company (VOC) archives. These archives not only provide insights into the VOC’s operations but also offer rare glimpses into early modern societies in Asia, Africa, and Australia. For these regions, where few archival sources exist, the VOC archives hold unique and invaluable information, illuminating their multifaceted interactions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. GLOBALISE’s mission is to empower researchers and the general public to explore these archives and write new, inclusive histories.
Our primary focus is on the Overgekomen Brieven en Papieren (Received Letters and Papers) series, a vital collection that documents the VOC’s extensive reach. From 2022 to 2026, we are applying state-of-the-art AI methods to transcribe over 5 million handwritten pages and extract key entities, such as persons and places, as well as events from the texts. This wealth of information, complemented by high-quality reference data, will be made available in a user-friendly, advanced research platform, fostering a deeper understanding of this significant historical era.
Project
Discover more about GLOBALISE’s aims and methods on our Project Overview page, delve into the details of our unique source corpus, and meet our expert team. Longer background documentation, for example about our mission and scope, and ethics guidelines, is available on GLOBALISE Docs.
Engage with us
At GLOBALISE, we highly value collaborations with scholars, citizen scientists, artists, and all those interested in the VOC archives. Find out more about our ongoing collaborations, explore opportunities to join us in roles like guest researchers or interns, and learn how you can actively engage with us at GLOBALISE events.
Research tools
Explore our GLOBALISE Lab page for innovative experiments, including a prototype transcription viewer where you can search through 5 million VOC document scans, and access a variety of valuable datasets for your research on our Dataverse.
News
Subscribe to our Newsletter or follow us on Twitter (@_GLOBALISE) to stay up to date on the latest GLOBALISE developments, news, and announcements.
Upcoming events
On December 18, 2024, Radboud University Nijmegen will host the workshop “Since 1624: Studying the Impact of the VOC in Taiwan”. This event will highlight innovative research methods and fresh perspectives on the history and enduring impact of the VOC in Taiwain. Key themes include methodological advances in studying colonial archives, interdisciplinary approaches, and the use of digital tools to reinterpret historical data.
Two of the workshop’s contributions will discuss the GLOBALISE project, showcasing its role in advancing research on VOC-era records and its broader relevance to the field.
For the full program and registration, visit the official workshop announcement.
Prototype transcriptions viewer available!
The 5 million scans of the ‘Overgekomen Brieven en Papieren’ of the VOC are now fully searchable in a temporary, very basic transcriptions viewer at https://transcriptions.globalise.huygens.knaw.nl/. As of June 2024, v0.3 of this viewer is online. We welcome your feedback on searching and exploring the GLOBALISE source corpus on our Canny platform space or via our contact form. The Canny environment also lists feature requests from users.
Check out our GLOBALISE Lab for other prototypes and experiments to make our transcriptions and data accessible to the public. Finished datasets are available on our Dataverse.
Latest blog posts
- From ABC to VOC Volume: Utilizing Traditional Finding Aids for the GLOBALISE Infrastructure
In June of 1699, seven-year-old Maria de Graeff attended school in the town of Cochin (present-day Kochi) on the southwest coast of India, together with her two sisters Francina and Johanna. Just like her peers, she was learning how to spell after learning her ABCs. Her father, Bartram de Graeff, was most likely employed by… Read more: From ABC to VOC Volume: Utilizing Traditional Finding Aids for the GLOBALISE Infrastructure - Unearthing Insights at the GLOBALISE Commodity Data Sprint
As you might have read in our recent blog post about the commodities dataset (if you haven’t, please take a look), we are actively seeking feedback and input for our new commodities dataset. In that spirit, we hosted the data sprint ‘What on Earth is This? Defining, Labeling and Classifying Early Modern Commodities’ at the… Read more: Unearthing Insights at the GLOBALISE Commodity Data Sprint - Thesaurus Treasures: Why We’re Creating a Hierarchical Lexicon of Commodities
Working with the GLOBALISE transcriptions of the VOC archives that are publicly available both as a download and through a temporary transcription viewer can be challenging. As the archival material spans two centuries, multiple continents and millions of pages, it is sometimes difficult to find what you’re looking for. The archive is full of terms… Read more: Thesaurus Treasures: Why We’re Creating a Hierarchical Lexicon of Commodities