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 ethics guidelines, will shortly become 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
Prototype transcriptions viewer available!
The 5 million scans of the ‘Overgekomen Brieven en Papieren’ of the VOC are now fully searchable. From early October 2023, a prototype of the GLOBALISE transcriptions viewer is online at: https://transcriptions.globalise.huygens.knaw.nl/. We welcome your feedback on searching and exploring the first version (v1.0) of the GLOBALISE source corpus through our contact form.
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.
Follow us on Twitter (@_GLOBALISE) to stay up to date on the GLOBALISE project.
Upcoming events
There are currently no scheduled events.
Latest blog posts
- Old Maps, New Discoveries: A Datasprint’s Digital Exploration
Earlier this year, GLOBALISE together with the University of Amsterdam’s CREATE Lab organised a collaborative datasprint on historical places in the area around the Indian Ocean and Indonesian archipelago. This resulted in 48 georeferenced historical maps from the collection of the Dutch National Archives, almost 500 annotations of visual map features, and above all lots… Read more: Old Maps, New Discoveries: A Datasprint’s Digital Exploration - Textile Taxonomies – GLOBALISE’s efforts in defining traded textiles in the Indian Ocean Region
Do you know what a roll of ‘periemoenemolam’ is? Or what ‘gorgorongs’ are for that matter? Chance is, that you will at some point encounter cryptic terms like these as types of traded goods in the archives of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). VOC ships carried a wide range of commodities in their holds.… Read more: Textile Taxonomies – GLOBALISE’s efforts in defining traded textiles in the Indian Ocean Region - Aligning GLOBALISE with Researchers’ Needs
While reading through archival records, you probably often come across names of people or places that you are unfamiliar with. In those moments, nothing is better than having access to resources that have already provided context on those historical persons or places. If your curiosity is tickled enough after such encounters, or secondary resources do… Read more: Aligning GLOBALISE with Researchers’ Needs