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.…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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
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…
