Blog posts
- The Languages of GLOBALISE
The vast majority of documents in the GLOBALISE VOC corpus were written in Dutch. But what of the letters, petitions, treaties, and diplomatic notes in this collection which were exchanged in other regional and European languages with local rulers, trading companies or VOC employees? We already know that a significant but still unknown quantity of these documents exist because of references to them in the VOC inventories, previous scholarship by researchers and because we’ve occasionally even run across them ourselves during the course of our work. In fact, being able to filter search results by language was one of the… Read more: The Languages of GLOBALISE - 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, early colonialism, and the Indian Ocean and East Asia. He interned with the GLOBALISE project in September 2023 and was involved in the co-creation of the dataset on places. In this post, Marc shares insights from his thesis and explains how he utilized the GLOBALISE project’s transcription viewer to support his research. How can social solidarity thrive in highly mobile, culturally diverse, yet ethnically segregated societies? Port cities, shaped by… Read more: Closeness at a Distance? The Port Town Paradox - 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 Johanna. Just like her peers, she was learning how to spell after learning her ABCs. Her father, Bartram de Graeff, was most likely employed by the Dutch East India Company (VOC), as were the parents of the other 54 children who attended the same school. All this information can be found in a document titled Rolle der schoolkinderen soodaenigh deses present alhier ter steede Cochim bevonden met aanwijsinge haerer ouderen,… Read more: From ABC to VOC Volume: Utilizing Traditional Finding Aids for the GLOBALISE Infrastructure - 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 new commodities dataset. In that spirit, we hosted the data sprint ‘What on Earth is This? Defining, Labeling and Classifying Early Modern Commodities’ at the University of Amsterdam’s Humanities Labs on December 4, 2023, focussing on introducing the dataset to participants and collaboratively supplementing and improving it. Twenty researchers attended the event either in person or online. The goal of the sprint was to invite participants to find definitions for… Read more: Unearthing Insights at the GLOBALISE Commodity Data Sprint - 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 spans two centuries, multiple continents and millions of pages, it is sometimes difficult to find what you’re looking for. The archive is full of terms and expressions that are not familiar to a modern audience, but that are essential to both finding relevant material and understanding what you’ve found. One does not need to look for long to find an example of this challenge. Most people with a passing familiarity… Read more: Thesaurus Treasures: Why We’re Creating a Hierarchical Lexicon of Commodities - 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 van Interactieve Systemen (OIS) introduces Bachelor of Information Science, Game Technology, and Computer Science students to human-centred design: designing systems that closely match the activities, wishes and values of users and clients. We had heard that Frans was looking for design assignments for his students from non-profit organisations to give them an opportunity to develop their knowledge and skills in a real-world setting. The GLOBALISE project, in turn, was at… Read more: An interactive design collaboration with the University of Utrecht - Old Maps, New Discoveries: A Datasprint’s Digital Exploration
Earlier this year, GLOBALISE together with the University of Amsterdam’s CREATE Lab organised a collaborative datasprint on historical places in the area around the Indian Ocean and Indonesian archipelago. This resulted in 48 georeferenced historical maps from the collection of the Dutch National Archives, almost 500 annotations of visual map features, and above all lots of learning. Historical places present GLOBALISE with many challenges. They are often referred to with different name variants (colonial and indigenous) and spellings in the documents of the VOC. Their names sometimes change over time. Little is known of some of the smaller places. Several… Read more: Old Maps, New Discoveries: A Datasprint’s Digital Exploration - Textile Taxonomies – GLOBALISE’s efforts in defining traded textiles in the Indian Ocean Region
Do you know what a roll of ‘periemoenemolam’ is? Or what ‘gorgorongs’ are for that matter? Chance is, that you will at some point encounter cryptic terms like these as types of traded goods in the archives of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). This blog post tells about the efforts of the GLOBALISE project to create a thesaurus of textiles that helps researchers find their way in the VOC archives - Aligning GLOBALISE with Researchers’ Needs
While reading through archival records, you probably often come across names of people or places that you are unfamiliar with. In those moments, nothing is better than having access to resources that have already provided context on those historical persons or places. If your curiosity is tickled enough after such encounters, or secondary resources do not disclose that much information, would it not be great to be able to search through the archives to find other mentions of a specific person, place, or commodity in different contexts? GLOBALISE is working towards creating a research hub that makes the Dutch East… Read more: Aligning GLOBALISE with Researchers’ Needs - The (Ground) Truth is out there: an introduction to GLOBALISE’s use of Handwritten Text Recognition
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… Read more: The (Ground) Truth is out there: an introduction to GLOBALISE’s use of Handwritten Text Recognition - Automatic Event Detection in Early Modern Dutch (VOC) documents: the Annotation Phase
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,… Read more: Automatic Event Detection in Early Modern Dutch (VOC) documents: the Annotation Phase - Rediscovering Early Modern Polities: First Thoughts on Dataset Creation
Update: we published a first version of the Polities dataset in July 2024. https://hdl.handle.net/10622/SOS0KC 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… Read more: Rediscovering Early Modern Polities: First Thoughts on Dataset Creation - Looking back on a successful kickoff meeting
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… Read more: Looking back on a successful kickoff meeting