GLOBALISE: From Text to Context in the Dutch East India Company Archives
Bodleian Bytes
Photo: Dave Straatmeyer © DAVE.Amsterdam
Join us online on Thursday 13 February for 'GLOBALISE: From Text to Context in the Dutch East India Company Archives' with Kay Pepping, the latest talk in the Bodleian Bytes series, hosted by the Centre for Digital Scholarship at the Bodleian Libraries.
GLOBALISE uses digital tools such as Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) and Named Entity Recognition (NER) to make the Dutch East India Company (VOC)'s archives accessible and researchable on an unprecedented scale. In this talk, Kay Pepping demonstrates how opening up archival texts allows for contextualizing entities such as loanwords, people, and places to support new inquiries into colonial and global histories.
GLOBALISE
The GLOBALISE project has digitised and transcribed five million scans from the Dutch East India Company (VOC) archives. Spanning two centuries, three continents and topics far beyond the traditional 'trade, warfare and diplomacy', these archives are a vital resource for understanding the early modern Asian world.
The existing indexes, archival inventories and even keyword search on those five million transcriptions do not allow easy research into topics beyond the company's direct interest.
To address these challenges, GLOBALISE aims to move beyond just providing texts by creating reference data to contextualize entities such as people, commodities, and places through structured, expandable systems that can enrich search queries. This reference data mixes the wealth of research already done on the company with new techniques that leverage the archives themselves to identify and define foreign or ambiguous terms, preserving traces of linguistic and cultural exchanges within the VOC's documentation.
Whether exploring the lives of local laborers, tracking ecological changes, or analysing cultural exchanges, GLOBALISE hopes to give researchers the tools to use the VOC archives to the fullest.
Speaker Biography
Kay Pepping
Kay Pepping graduated in history at Leiden, with a focus on early modern diplomacy and colonial history, including a master’s thesis on Dutch East India Company (VOC) negotiations at the local level. Now part of the GLOBALISE project at the Huygens Institute, he combines his interests in digital humanities with his interest in the early modern period.
Bodleian Bytes
Bodleian Bytes is a series of online talks hosted by the Centre for Digital Scholarship at the Bodleian Libraries. The series engages with innovative national and international research in digital scholarship. It is a virtual space for discussions surrounding different tools and methodologies whilst also providing inspiration for future digital research.
