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 Bluesky (@globalise.bsky.social) and LinkedIn to stay up to date on the latest GLOBALISE developments, news, and announcements.
Upcoming events
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.
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. The site also contains a section with resources that used to be available on the TANAP website, including archival inventories of VOC related collections worldwide and a large collection of transcribed documents related to the VOC settlement at the Cape of Good Hope. 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!
Latest blog posts
- Towards Creating Meaningful Infrastructures for Colonial Archives
The digitization of colonial archives opens up many possibilities for exploring collections in new ways – thereby making room for previously hidden perspectives – but it also has its challenges. Digitizing Colonial Archives: Opportunities and Challenges Archives are not neutral because they have been created from a certain perspective and preserved for specific purposes. As… Read more: Towards Creating Meaningful Infrastructures for Colonial Archives - The Languages of GLOBALISE
The vast majority of documents in the GLOBALISE VOC corpus were written in Dutch. But what of the letters, petitions, treaties, and diplomatic notes in this collection which were exchanged in other regional and European languages with local rulers, trading companies or VOC employees? We already know that a significant but still unknown quantity of… Read more: The Languages of GLOBALISE - Closeness at a Distance? The Port Town Paradox
Marc Widmer has recently graduated from the Free University of Berlin and the Humboldt University of Berlin with a master’s degree in Global History. His studies focus on urban history, early colonialism, and the Indian Ocean and East Asia. He interned with the GLOBALISE project in September 2023 and was involved in the co-creation of… Read more: Closeness at a Distance? The Port Town Paradox