GLOBALISE newsletter 1

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 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 Contextualization, and Semantic Contextualization work packages. Only four months into the project, we have been able to improve the HTR on VOC archives, lay the first stones in a working Natural Language Processing system, and curate several datasets for the historical contextualization of entities.

After the introduction, we asked participants to join one of four thematic tables during two rounds of discussion sessions to exchange expertise on questions that are central to the project. The discussion groups were centered around 1) aligning GLOBALISE with researchers’ needs, 2) the design of the research hub, 3) decolonization and data creation, and 4) data enrichment and modelling. The sessions resulted in very valuable insights, which we would like to highlight and respond to on our blog.

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Upcoming: GLOBALISE seminars

To continue exchanging knowledge and experience, we want to host monthly GLOBALISE seminars on various relevant topics from the fall of 2022. The seminars (will) have a relatively open setup with short (10 min.) presentations by a GLOBALISE team member and other experts on the topic, and ample room for questions and discussion.  

To give an idea of what that could look like, we have planned two upcoming seminars in May and June:

*Huygens Institute: Oudezijds Achterburgwal 185, 1012 DK Amsterdam