This post explores how natural language search opens up new ways of discovering hidden stories in the VOC archives, from environmental interventions and religious policies to the lives and activities of women.
GLOBALISE held the roundtable “The Changing Archive: Digitization, Translation, and Historical Research on the Early Modern Indian Ocean World” on 2 December 2025. This post summarizes the key points of discussion.
This blog traces the fragmented story of Maria, an enslaved woman from Liuqiu. Her case exposes the violence masked by the Dutch East India Company’s claims of humane governance and shows how projects such as GLOBALISE and Voices of Resistance are transforming our ability to uncover marginalized lives and the afterlives of colonial genocide.
Nikhil Bellarykar, an external collaborator with the GLOBALISE project, shares practical strategies for finding historical place names in VOC records using the GLOBALISE transcriptions viewer.
Asawari Luthra joined the GLOBALISE project as a guest researcher in the period June 2024 – May 2025. In this blog, she tells about the ethnographic research she conducted to explore how access to GLOBALISE’s digital infrastructure can be made safer and more decolonised.
On 6 February 1642, the ships of Jacob Liesvelt, merchant of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), arrived at the Thoron bay on the coast of Quinam. Here, he sent…
Introduction The Dutch East India Company (VOC) records are in the Nationaal Archief Den Haag, under the number 1.04.02. These trading company records span two centuries and cover a wide…
This blogpost contains references to methods of punishment that users might find disturbing. The Dutch East India Company (VOC) established and controlled numerous trading posts (factories) across maritime Asia, one…
How a lexical approach to event extraction can provide some first answers In order to enable our users to not only look for entities, like places, people, or organizations, but…
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.…
