Events

Upcoming events

• Symposium: Colonial Archives and Meaningful Digital Infrastructure

  Date: Friday, 24 January 2025
  Time: 10:00 – 15:00 CET
  Location: Radboud University, Thomas van Aquinostraat 4, 6525 GD Nijmegen

  How can digital infrastructures for colonial archives support a better understanding of historical and contemporary issues? This symposium brings together researchers and practitioners to discuss the challenges and opportunities of working with digitized colonial records.

  👉 Register now to participate in person or online.

  Key topics

  • Colonial archives and global significance
    Reflect on the relevance of these archives for understanding shared histories and their broader implications.
  • Text recognition and digital access
    Explore what comes after digitization and how to create meaningful tools for using complex historical records.
  • Biases in the archive
    Address the inherent biases in colonial records and their impact on research and public access.
  • Reaching new audiences
    Consider how digital infrastructures can engage diverse groups, including descendants of colonized communities.

  

  Event overview

  Many archives related to the Dutch colonial past have been digitised in recent years. From the archives of the VOC and WIC to early modern family, notarial, and business archives. These archives are closely intertwined with the colonial past itself. They contain information that sheds light on the (everyday) consequences and experiences of colonialism worldwide. These archives also provide access to information about non-European societies that is often not preserved in other ways. Colonial archives are often literally world heritage. More and more archives are therefore being made accessible through digitisation and text recognition. But as rich and diverse as these archives are, they are not neutral.

  Challenges and questions

  The symposium Colonial archives and meaningful digital infrastructure explores challenges, questions, and examples surrounding digital access and enrichment of shared resources related to the colonial past.

  • How can digital infrastructure contribute to making unique information about the people and societies affected by or resisting colonialism findable and researchable?
  • How can multiple perspectives and the many voices in these archives be made more visible?
  • How can we ethically employ new techniques?
  • And who are the true beneficiaries of advanced access and research infrastructure?
  • Who should these initiatives serve, and how can global stakeholders beyond Dutch and professional users be reached (such as the descendants of colonized societies and of those societies whose pasts can be reconstructed using these archives)?

  New approaches

  Last spring, the advice Dealing with shared sources of the colonial past. Advice on repair and restitution in relation to colonial archives by the Dutch Council for Culture called attention to the role that a responsible handling of colonial archives can play in a better understanding of the impact of colonialism worldwide and its legacies to the present day. It also emphasised that colonial archives themselves are often tools that serviced colonial rule, and whose accessibility has often accentuated the flawed and one-sided perspectives that they bear.

  New approaches are thus key to ensuring that new digital access and user infrastructures do not amplify colonial distortions or injustices, but instead contribute to dialogues in, and between, former colonizer and colonised societies. This leads to the question: how can digital infrastructures for colonial archives contribute to a better understanding of past and present in a complex world of present-day inequalities and memory cultures?

  Program and practical information

  The program will include sessions, discussions, and opportunities to share ideas. The full program will be posted here shortly. Confirmed speakers and moderators include:

  • Rita Tjien Fooh, national archivist and director National Archives of Suriname, and President Forum of National Archivists
  • Nadeera Rupesinghe, director general National Archives of Sri Lanka and historian of VOC Sri Lanka
  • Margo Groenewoud, specialist in colonial archives and digital humanities and historian of the Caribbean
  • Wisaal Abrahams, visual producer, visual artist and researcher of South African society and history
  • Liedeke Plate, professor and director Radboud Institute for Culture and History, specialized in art, culture and inclusion
  • Elisabeth Heijmans, historian Antwerp University, specialized in early modern French and Dutch overseas expansion
  • Hylkje de Jong, professor history of law VU University and projectleader HUF-project
  • Manjusha Kuruppath, team leader at the digital infrastructure project GLOBALISE and historian of the VOC and colonial encounters
  • Sophie Rose, historian Universität Tübingen, specialized in gender, race and religious plurality in colonial history
  • Wim Manuhutu, heritage specialist and historian VU University, specialized in Moluccan and colonial history
  • And various young professionals of GLOBALISE and research projects, including Kay Pepping, Brecht Nijman, Stella Verkijk, Britt van Duijvenvoorde, Pascal Konings, Dung Pham, Henrike Vellinga 

  Lunch is not provided, but nearby options are available during the break from 12:00 to 13:00. For those unable to attend in person, an online option is available (registration required for the link).

  Inaugural Lecture

  

  After the symposium, attendees are invited to join the inaugural lecture of GLOBALISE project leader Matthias van Rossum (in Dutch) at 15:45, titled De ‘jongens’ van Bontekoe? Over nut en noodzaak van mondiale geschiedenissen van kolonialisme en arbeid. Separate registration is required through the form on the Radboud University announcement page.

  Organizers

  

  • GLOBALISE
  • Combatting Bias

  

  • Resisting Enslavement

  

  • Radboud Institute for Culture & History

  Register now to participate in the symposium in person or online.

• Announcement: Inaugural Lecture by Matthias van Rossum

  GLOBALISE is delighted to announce the inaugural lecture of its project leader Matthias van Rossum, who has been appointed to the special chair of Global Histories of Labour and Colonialism at Radboud University. His lecture, titled De ‘jongens’ van Bontekoe? Over nut en noodzaak van mondiale geschiedenissen van kolonialisme en arbeid, will take place on Friday, January 24, 2025, at 3:45 PM in the Radboud Aula in Nijmegen. A livestream of the event will be available.

  The lecture will be delivered in Dutch.

  Registration is required to attend and can be completed via the Radboud University website. For more details and to register, visit Radboud University’s official annoucement.

Past events

• GLOBALISE seminar: CAPASIA, The Asian Origins of Global Capitalism

  Join us for a seminar presented by the CAPASIA and GLOBALISE projects!

  Date: Tuesday, 21 May 2024
  Time: 15:00 – 16:00 CEST, drinks afterwards
  Location: Room 2.18 of the Spinhuis, Oudezijds Achterburgwal 185, 1012 DK Amsterdam

  Speakers

  • Maarten Draper (European University Institute)
  • Sebastian Majstorovic (European University Institute)

  Referent

  • Luc Bulten (Radboud University)

  Seminar overview

  The CAPASIA project analyzes approximately 150 European ‘factories’ established in maritime Asia between 1500-1800. It views these not just as trade locations, but as vibrant hubs of material and information exchanges between Asians and Europeans. The project uses the factories as a lens to explore the Asian origins of global capitalism. In their talk, Maarten Draper and Sebastian Majstorovic will provide an overview of the aims and methodology of the CAPASIA project, including the development of a comprehensive database of these factories. They will also discuss how the CAPASIA and GLOBALISE projects align and build upon each other.

  CAPASIA (https://www.capasia.eu/) is a five-year ERC-funded project hosted at the European University Institute in Florence. Its deliverables include a user-friendly website that will serve as a repository for data on the factories, a meeting place for scholars, and a medium for decolonizing histories of global capitalism. GLOBALISE (https://globalise.huygens.knaw.nl/), a five-year NWO-funded project based at the Huygens Institute in Amsterdam, focuses on making the VOC archives more accessible to researchers.

  

• GLOBALISE Datasprint: What on Earth is This? Defining, Labeling and Classifying Early Modern Commodities

  Date: Monday 4 December
  Time: 13:00 – 16:15
  Location: Room F0.01 at the Humanities Labs, University of Amsterdam (Bushuis, Kloveniersburgwal 48 Amsterdam).
  Parallel sessions will be organised for online participants.
  Registration: Eventbrite
  Tools: Bring your own laptop!

  Are you a historian or a student of history at university with a keen interest in trade, material culture, commodity histories or just good old historical research? If yes, we at the GLOBALISE Project (KNAW Humanities Cluster), in collaboration with the CREATE Lab (UvA), invite you to participate in a workshop to contribute to and enrich our thesaurus of commodities traded in the early modern Indian Ocean world.

  As part of our effort to contextualise the contents of millions of pages from the VOC archives, we are creating a glossary and taxonomy of hundreds of commodities that were traded by the Dutch East India Company and local communities. We plan to publish the first online version of the dataset shortly. Owing to the size of the Dutch East India Company archives, this makes this corpus the potentially single largest source available to uncovering the history of the region. For this reason, we believe that our commodities dataset will be of indispensable use for researching these archives and writing new histories of trade and consumption in the Indian Ocean in the period.

  

  We would like to invite you to participate in a half-day datasprint where we will research the definition of commodities, scour the VOC archives and other sources to find alternative labels for these goods, and even categorise commodities in groups that would be interesting and valuable for your own research. This will be the perfect opportunity to sink your teeth into the archives of the Dutch East India Company, learn more about commodities that crossed the early modern seas, deploy your skills of historical research, interact with like-minded students and scholars, and contribute to the creation of a vital, shared resource.

  Programme

  13:00 – 13:15 Introduction
  13:15 – 14:15 Sprint part 1
  14:15 – 14:30 Break
  14:30 – 14:45 Commodity Stories
  14:45 – 15:45 Sprint part 2
  15:45 – 16:15 Closing discussion

• GLOBALISE HTR Launch

  Date: Wednesday 4 October 2023
  Time: 12:15 – 17:30 CEST
  Location: International Institute of Social History, Cruquiusweg 31, 1019 AT Amsterdam
  Registration (required): Eventbrite

  GLOBALISE is pleased to announce that the first results of the project are now available to all. You are warmly invited to find out more at an event hosted by the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, on Wednesday 4 October 2023 from 12:15 to 17:30 CEST.

  The program features the launch of a simple viewer for searching and browsing the transcriptions, and sessions in which the team will share updates on the project and future plans. Also, participants can search through the transcriptions in a hands-on workshop session (and perhaps find that one obscure reference they were looking for!). Finally, there will be short presentations of recent research with the VOC archives and time for discussion.

  

  Please note that this event will be on site in Amsterdam.

  Programme

  12:15 – 13:00 Walk-in lunch (upon registration)

  13:00 – 13:20 Introduction and updates

  13:20 – 14:00 Workshop: working with the VOC transcriptions

  14:00 – 14:15 Break

  14:15 – 14:50 Research presentations

  14:50 – 15:25 Reflections

  15:25 – 15:50 Break

  15:50 – 16:40 Looking ahead, Q&A

  16:50 – 16:45 Closing remarks

  16:45 – 17:30 Drinks

• GLOBALISE Datasprint: Mapping Places in the Indian Ocean World

  In collaboration with the CREATE Lab, University of Amsterdam

  Date: Monday 15 May 2023
  Time: 13:00 – 17:00 CEST
  Location: Bushuis F0.01, Kloveniersburgwal 48, 1012 CX Amsterdam
  Registration: via Eventbrite

  Introduction

  Historical places are important building blocks for the reconstruction of historical events. The GLOBALISE corpus of about 5 million pages from the VOC archives describes hundreds of thousands of events that took place over a period of two centuries in a large number of locations spread over a huge area around the Indian Ocean and Indonesian archipelago. Thanks to initiatives like the Atlas of Mutual Heritage and the World Historical Gazetteer, we can locate some of the places mentioned, but by no means all of them. Within GLOBALISE, we would like to bring as much of these locations to light as possible by creating a dataset that identifies and geolocates historical places mentioned in our texts. This is challenging, as disambiguation of spelling variations is not always easy, place names appear in different languages, change over time, and sources present ambiguous references to locations.

  This datasprint aims to foster collaboration between historians, heritage professionals and data scientists for better availability of data on historical places. It intends to curate, publish, and link data on historical places collected by researchers within their own projects, as well as test and improve digital techniques to extract, structure, and share data on places. In addition to data creation, curation, and linking, this datasprint will offer a space to exchange knowledge and expertise on historical places and contexts, and digital techniques. We hope that by the end of the datasprint, all participants will have learned something, and that we will have generated valuable data on historical locations with which to improve our understanding of the early modern Indian Ocean and Indonesian archipelago worlds.

  Sessions

  The datasprint consists of three simultaneous sessions on georeferencing, data extraction, and data linking respectively. Everyone with an affinity or interest in (early modern) maps, history of the Indian Ocean World, or digital techniques for data extraction, is welcome to join regardless of technical / historical proficiency!

  Georeferencing early modern maps

  Chair: Jules Schoonman (TU Delft)
  Preparation: None.
  Tools: Your own laptop with an up-to-date browser (preferably Firefox or Chrome) with javascript enabled.

  Digitised historical maps can be challenging to read and compare to modern-day maps, due to their difference in style, orientation, map projection and more. In these scenarios, it is helpful to georeference a map by relating several points to geospatial coordinates. On the basis of this information, the map can be used as an overlay in interactive web maps or GIS-applications, allowing for direct comparison between then and now. Other use cases include drawing geospatial data on the historical map or, conversely, the vectorisation of its features. Traditionally, such methods require the creation of derivatives, duplicate server infrastructures, and the use of proprietary software–often not resulting in open and reusable data.

  This session introduces Allmaps, a new set of open-source tools to georeference, view and explore digitised maps from institutions supporting the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF). Using the sub-collection of maps from the Atlas of Mutual Heritage originating from the National Archives, we will (1) learn about IIIIF and how to find the right endpoints, (2) georeference maps in the Allmaps Editor, (3) learn about the format of a Georeference Annotation, (4) view the map in the Allmaps Viewer, (5) explore other uses for georeferenced maps.

  

  Data extraction from early modern maps

  Chair: Melvin Wevers (University of Amsterdam)
  Preparation: None.
  Tools: Your own laptop with an up-to-date browser (preferably Firefox or Chrome) with javascript enabled.

  A substantial collection of historical location data for the Indian Ocean and Indonesian archipelago worlds is already available, notably in the Atlas of Mutual Heritage database that provides useful metadata for visual sources such as old maps. We aim to expand on this by, for instance, identifying locations and other geospatial features on a selection of old maps from the National Archives. In this session we will first try to identify the kind of information that can be extracted from old maps (e.g. inhabited places, but also, for example, plantations, mills, and harbours) to come up with an initial annotation framework, after which we will annotate these maps ourselves. The resulting data can be a starting point for automating the information extraction from old maps further.

  

  Curating and linking new places data(sets) via World Historical Gazetteer

  Chair: Rombert Stapel (International Institute of Social History)
  Preparation (optional): Bring your own data – a clean places dataset and access to your own dataset during session.
  Tools: Your own laptop.

  Do you have a finished or in-progress dataset on historical locations originating from your research or personal project and would you like to be able to geolocate these places and enrich your data with other historical data? In this session, we will work together to curate locations datasets to then upload them to the World Historical Gazetteer database and link them to other places in the WHG index – generating new, accessible, and reusable data on historical places.

  

  Programme

  13:00 Introduction

  13:45 Breakout sessions: start

  15:00 Break

  15:15 Breakout sessions: wrapping up

  16:00 Session results and conclusions

  16:30 Reflection

  17:00 Drinks

• GLOBALISE seminar: Historical Events and Frames Annotation Processes

  28 NOVEMBER 2022

  • Jens Aurich (Junior Researcher | International Institute for Social History)
    “Finding and Annotating Collective Labour Actions in Newspapers with INCEpTION”
  • Stella Verkijk (Developer | GLOBALISE)
    “Towards Automatic Event Detection in VOC Documents”

  Date: Monday, 28 November 2022
  Time: 15:00 – 16:30 CET
  Location: Spinhuis room 2.18* & Zoom
  *Huygens Institute: Oudezijds Achterburgwal 185, 1012 DK Amsterdam

• GLOBALISE seminar: Classification of Historical Data and Collections

  31 OCTOBER 2022

  • Shannon van Muijden (Datamanager | Zuiderzeemuseum)
    “Classification and Linked Data for Heritage Collections”
  • Toine Pieters (Professor | Utrecht University)
    “Classification of pharmaceutical and botanical data in TimeCapsule”
  • Kay Pepping (Junior Researcher | GLOBALISE)
    “Creating a commodity classification for the Indian Ocean World”

  Date: Monday, 31 October 2022
  Time: 15:00 – 16:30 CET
  Location: Spinhuis room 2.18* & Zoom

• GLOBALISE seminar: Writing Global Histories with the VOC Archives

  26 SEPTEMBER 2022

  What kind of information do the VOC archives contain, how do we use them to write histories and what difficulties do we face in the process?

  During this seminar, we will look at the VOC archives from a researcher’s point of view in light of different projects.

  With presentations by:

  • Hanna te Velde (Researcher | VU Amsterdam)
    “Women and their strategies for socio-economic mobility in VOC and WIC settlements”
  • Maarten Manse (Researcher | VU Amsterdam)
    “The VOC archives as a lens on early modern globalisation”
  • Manjusha Kuruppath (Researcher | GLOBALISE)
    “From VOC archives to datasets and back”

  Date: Monday, 26 September 2022
  Time: 15:00 – 16:30 CEST
  Location: Spinhuis room 2.18* & Zoom

• GLOBALISE seminar: Entity Modelling and Historical Observations

  27 JUNE 2022

  • Claude Chevaleyre (Researcher | Bonn University)
    Modelling Observations of Slave Trade and Human Trafficking
  • Leon van Wissen (Data Engineer | GLOBALISE)
    Modelling Globalise Pilot Data

  Date: Monday, 27 June 2022
  Time: 15:00 – 16:30 CEST
  Location: Spinhuis room 2.18* & Zoom
  *Huygens Institute: Oudezijds Achterburgwal 185, 1012 DK Amsterdam

• GLOBALISE seminar: Entity Linking and (the Trouble of) Historical Data

  30 MAY 2022

  • Bas van den Brink (Student | UvA)
    Entitity Linking in Structured Data on Slave Trade
  • Megan Hadasa Leal Causton (Researcher | National Archives)
    Entity Linking in Structured Data and HTR-ed Archival Series
  • Gerhard de Kok (Researcher | GLOBALISE)
    Entity Linking in Structured and Linked Data on VOC Ships

  Date: Monday, 30 May 2022
  Time: 15:00 – 16:30 CEST
  Location: Spinhuis room 2.18* & Zoom

• GLOBALISE kickoff

  11 MAY 2022

  Location: International Institute for Social History, Amsterdam & Zoom

  See this blog post by Merve Tosun to learn more about the GLOBALISE kickoff meeting.