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…
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,…
Index to VOC volume 1619
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…
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…
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…
An interactive design collaboration with the University of Utrecht
Last year we had the pleasure of working with Frans Wiering and a large group of enthusiastic students from his Designing Interactive Systems course at the University of Utrecht. Ontwerpen…
Example annotations in Recogito on land map ‘Kaart van het Eiland Ceylon, een klein gedeelte van de Kust van Malabar, Madure en Cormandel’ (4.VEL, 924).
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…
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). This blog post tells about the efforts of the GLOBALISE project to create a thesaurus of textiles that helps researchers find their way in the VOC archives
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…
The (Ground) Truth is out there: an introduction to GLOBALISE’s use of Handwritten Text Recognition
Anyone who has ever worked with the archives of the Dutch East India Company is bound to be impressed with its sheer scope. Even when limiting its ambitions to the…