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 letters, reports and other documents sent over from Asia to the Dutch Republic, GLOBALISE is faced with thousands of inventory numbers. Each of those numbers represents a hefty tome at the National Archives big enough to give students who don’t lift from the knees future back problems. Despite the efforts of countless historians who have created source publications of parts of the archive, most of this material is still only […]
In order to unlock as much information as possible from our archives, a big part of the GLOBALISE project is developing software that can automatically detect events in the texts. This would mean, for example, that you could search for and extract data about events like shipwrecks, armed conflicts, or even more fine-grained events like the dismissal of a certain general. Event detection and its challenges This is a complex task because events do not only encompass the verbs, or even nouns or other linguistic elements that describe them, but also the persons that played a role in the event, […]
You have been pouring over the archives for weeks together in search of precious information on your research subject. Just when you thought you had laid your hands on the document that would answer your research question (forgive the slight exaggeration here), you hit upon the name of a place or person that you know nothing of and this causes momentary bewilderment. As historians, we know this feeling of puzzlement all too well. This is why the GLOBALISE project is working to contextualise entities like the names of the places, ships and polities in the VOC archives. The first step to making […]
On 11 May 2022, the International Institute of Social History hosted the GLOBALISE kickoff for those associated with the project as board and steering committee members and interested researchers and developers working on similar topics. An international group of more than sixty scholars, developers and heritage specialists attended, both on location and online. The kickoff was a moment to introduce the project aims and approach, and to offer a peek into the first results of the Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR), Historical Contextualisation, and Semantic Contextualisation work packages. Only four months into the project, we have been able to improve the […]
View this email in your browser 13 December 2022 Review of 2022, new blog post and announcements Blog: "The (Ground) Truth is out there: an introduction to GLOBALISE’s use of Handwritten Text Recognition" Did you know Abrekocken are a type of apricots? GLOBALISE colleagues Maartje Hids and Kay Pepping hand out valuable HTR lessons in the […]
11 October 2022 User panel meetings, new blog post and seminars Seminar: "Classification of Historical Data and Collections" 31 OCTOBER 2022 Register for the seminar here. 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 […]
13 September 2022 New article, data contributions and seminar Article: "Transforming historical research practices – a digital infrastructure for the VOC archives" Read about the different processes behind the creation of the GLOBALISE research facility in this recently published article by Matthias van Rossum and Lodewijk Petram. The GLOBALISE process from scan to htr (I), […]
1 July 2022 New blog post, archival news & team introductions Blog: "Rediscovering Early Modern Polities: First Thoughts on Dataset Creation" Wonder why we create reference datasets and how we go about that? Read all about data curation in GLOBALISE in a new blog post by Manjusha Kuruppath. GLOBALISE seminars The first two installments of the […]
24 May 2022 On 11 May 2022, the International Institute of Social History hosted the GLOBALISE kickoff for those associated with the project as board and steering committee members and interested researchers and developers working on similar topics. An international group of more than sixty scholars, developers and heritage specialists attended, both on location and […]
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 letters, reports and other documents sent over from Asia to the Dutch Republic, GLOBALISE is faced with thousands of inventory numbers. Each of those numbers represents a hefty tome at the National Archives big enough to give students who don’t lift from the knees future back problems. Despite the efforts of countless historians who have created source publications of parts of the archive, most of this material is still only […]
In order to unlock as much information as possible from our archives, a big part of the GLOBALISE project is developing software that can automatically detect events in the texts. This would mean, for example, that you could search for and extract data about events like shipwrecks, armed conflicts, or even more fine-grained events like the dismissal of a certain general. Event detection and its challenges This is a complex task because events do not only encompass the verbs, or even nouns or other linguistic elements that describe them, but also the persons that played a role in the event, […]
You have been pouring over the archives for weeks together in search of precious information on your research subject. Just when you thought you had laid your hands on the document that would answer your research question (forgive the slight exaggeration here), you hit upon the name of a place or person that you know nothing of and this causes momentary bewilderment. As historians, we know this feeling of puzzlement all too well. This is why the GLOBALISE project is working to contextualise entities like the names of the places, ships and polities in the VOC archives. The first step to making […]
On 11 May 2022, the International Institute of Social History hosted the GLOBALISE kickoff for those associated with the project as board and steering committee members and interested researchers and developers working on similar topics. An international group of more than sixty scholars, developers and heritage specialists attended, both on location and online. The kickoff was a moment to introduce the project aims and approach, and to offer a peek into the first results of the Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR), Historical Contextualisation, and Semantic Contextualisation work packages. Only four months into the project, we have been able to improve the […]