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NEWS: Our NWO-groot project GLOBALISE has been granted!

Prof. Dr. Piek Vossen

As a co-applicant, I am excited to participate on behalf of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the GLOBALISE-project funded by the Dutch National Science organisation NWO (Programma Grootschalige Infrastructuur).

Huygens ING received 3,8 million euros for the prestigious GLOBALISE project to disclose the UNESCO archive with more than 25 million pages of historical records by the VOC. Together with the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Nationaal Archief, the International Institute of Social History and the KNAW Humanities Clusters, Huygens ING will develop a modern digital infrastructure to better understand the Dutch colonial history and the role of the VOC. 

My Computational Linguistics & Text Mining Lab (CLTL), will deliver the language technology to enrich the archive by detecting expressions for names of persons, organisations, ships and places but also the events that took place in the colonial regions in the Far East. Next, these expressions are mapped to specific identities: who, what, where and when, to generate a Knowledge Graph that represents the history as reported in the letters of the archive.

In addition to the recording of these reported facts, we keep track of the sources of the information which will inform us about their perspectives on the events, people and organisations. Our language technology builds on the reading machines that were developed previously in the BiographyNet and Newsreader projects and more recently adapted to the old-Dutch in the CLARIAH-plus project.

More info (in Dutch):