The trading post of the Dutch East India Company in Hooghly, Bengal. Painting by Hendrik van Schuylenburgh, 1665. Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, license CC0

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

  • A volume from the Overgekomen Brieven en Papieren series in the VOC archives. Photo Dave Straatmeyer.
    Symposium: Colonial Archives and Meaningful Digital Infrastructure
    Join us for a symposium on Colonial Archives, exploring innovative approaches to colonial archives and digital infrastructure.

    Key topics include:

    • Colonial archives and global significance
      Reflect on the relevance of these archives for understanding shared histories and their broader implications.
    • Text recognition and digital access
      Explore what comes after digitization and how to create meaningful tools for using complex historical records.
    • Biases in the archive
      Address the inherent biases in colonial records and their impact on research and public access.
    • Reaching new audiences
      Consider how digital infrastructures can engage diverse groups, including descendants of colonized communities.

    Date and time: 24 January 2025, 10 am – 3 pm CET
    Location: Radboud University, Nijmegen
    More information: full announcement

  • Picture of Matthias van Rossum, project leader GLOBALISE
    Announcement: Inaugural Lecture by Matthias van Rossum
    Join Matthias van Rossum’s inaugural lecture as he assumes the special chair of Global Histories of Labour and Colonialism at Radboud University. The lecture, De ‘jongens’ van Bontekoe? Over nut en noodzaak van mondiale geschiedenissen van kolonialisme en arbeid, will be held in Dutch.

    Date and time: January 24, 2025, 3:45 pm
    Location: Radboud Aula, Nijmegen
    More information and registration: Full 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.

Screenshot of GLOBALISE transcriptions viewer

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.

GLOBALISE Docs page now live

The GLOBALISE Docs page is now live! It offers in-depth background on key aspects of the project. Currently, you’ll find information on the project’s Ethics policy and a section outlining its mission and scope. Future updates will include documentation of the project ontology and a discussion of the GLOBALISE corpus.

Word2Vec experiment available on GLOBALISE Lab

Searching the VOC transcriptions can be challenging due to the numerous spelling variations and obscure terms in the VOC documents. Our Word2Vec model helps by identifying spelling variants, synonyms, and other semantic relationships for any word in the GLOBALISE corpus. Follow the instructions on our GLOBALISE Lab site and start exploring the possibilities of the model yourself!

Screenshot of instructions for using the GLOBALISE Word2Vec model.

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