GLOBALISE newsletter 3

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), and onwards through a process of historical contextualisation (II) interacting with semantic contextualisation (III) to a user-friendly infrastructure for complex querying (IV).

Seminar: "Writing global histories with the VOC archives"

26 SEPTEMBER 2022

To continue exchanging knowledge and experience, we host monthly GLOBALISE seminars on various relevant topics.
This month:

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”

Data contributions and Dataverse

If you have ever created datasets for your research on any topic related to early modern Asia and/or the VOC, and would like to get involved in our efforts to make the VOC archives more accessible to future researchers: consider contributing data to GLOBALISE!

We collect data on a range of subjects to improve our Named Entity Recognition (NER) models and to contextualize entities and events mentioned in the sources. This includes data on a range of subjects in a variety of fields, be it social, political, natural or economic history.

We value durability and transparency, so we store datasets in our Dataverse and document if / how we use this data in GitHub.

You can read more about this on our website.

Get to know us!

At GLOBALISE, we work in a growing team of historians and developers. We would like you to get to know the people behind the project better, which is why we will introduce each of our colleagues in this and upcoming newsletters. Now up: Maartje from work package 3: Historical Contextualisation and Stella from work package 4: Semantic Contextualisation.

Maartje Hids

I am a research assistant in the Historical Contextualisation team. My focus has mostly been on creating Ground Truth and constructing a polities dataset.

I also just started a second masters in Education this month to become a history teacher in secondary education, while also still working for Globalise.

When I’m not doing something history-related, you can probably find me in a swimming pool providing training (competitive swimming) or swimming myself.

A fun fact about me is that I always carry a book with me, no matter where I go or how long I am there – including the swimming pool.

Stella Verkijk

Since May, I have been working at GLOBALISE as a computational linguist on automatic event detection. Before this, my research was focused on medical data, and I have found the change to VOC-related documents written in Early Modern Dutch quite a fun challenge. I learn new things every day.

Besides being a computational linguist, I also speak fluent Spanish, I love dancing, and as you can see in the picture: my favourite colour is blue.

Anyone interested in discussing if and how computers can understand human language is always welcome to contact me.