GLOBALISE: Digital research infrastructure for VOC archives

07 November 2023 - 13:30

Consisting of approximately twenty-five million pages, the UNESCO Memory of the World-listed archives of the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, VOC) offer a unique view on interactions between European and non-European actors in Asia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Currently, however, doing research on this vast collection of handwritten documents is extremely challenging. The GLOBALISE project creates an online research infrastructure that unlocks the key series of VOC documents and reports for advanced new research methods. The infrastructure will engage the wider public with this many-sided and increasingly hotly-debated period of Dutch overseas history.

The International Institute of Social History collaborates in the GLOBALISE project. The GLOBALISE project is hosted by the Huygens Institute in collaboration with the IISH, the Digital Infrastructure of the Humanities Cluster, the National Archives of the Netherlands, the Computational Linguistics & Text Mining Lab of the Vrije Universiteit, and CREATE of the University of Amsterdam. The GLOBALISE project is funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) for the period 2021-2026.

More information: https://globalise.huygens.knaw.nl/

Projectleader: Matthias van Rossum

GLOBALISE is financed by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) in the Investment Grant NWO Large programme.