Transcriptions Viewer How-to Guide
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…
Incognito Royalty on the Princes Roijael
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…
NG-2008-60-25
Yes okay – but what were they doing?
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…
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.…
The Languages of GLOBALISE
Update: 25 July, 2025 We recently found examples of texts written in several new languages: Buginese, Gujarati, and Japanese. The vast majority of documents in the GLOBALISE VOC corpus were…
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…