Interested in joining the project as guest researcher, volunteer or intern?
We welcome students, scholars and citizen scientists to join our efforts to unlock the VOC archives. We are open to collaborations on varying levels in different phases of the project in order to further curate the rich corpus of data, and develop our Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) and Named Entity Recognition (NER) models.
Perfecting HTR and NER quality is crucial for getting optimal results for research queries. This requires a large amount of training data and in-depth review of preliminary results. We recognize the real value that volunteers can add to GLOBALISE with their time and effort put into correcting and enriching HTR and NER results as readers of old Dutch and / or specialists on related historical subjects.
Simultaneously, this is an opportunity for historians and interested public worldwide to work with historical sources and data at the intersection of national and world history as part of the GLOBALISE community, and benefit from the diverse expertise of a wide network of scholars.
We also encourage students of history, digital humanities, data science or computer science to get in touch with us for research and training opportunities as part of an internship, (final) assignment or master’s thesis. For currently available internships and possible thesis themes, please see below.
Specific calls for collaboration will be advertised in our newsletter and on our website.
In the meantime, please feel free to drop Merve Tosun a line at merve.tosun@iisg.nl with your questions or to talk over forms of collaboration.
Internships
Internship applications for 2023 are closed. New slots for 2024 will be advertised here in Fall 2023. Sign up for our newsletter to be notified.
Research themes
Students can work with us in context of their final assignment or thesis research in the following fields starting in 2024:
Early Modern History of the Indian Ocean Region and Asia
Dutch East India Company History
Application of and / or Reflections on Data Science / Digital History Techniques
Archival Afterlives and Decolonisation