From Wednesday, five million scanned documents from the archives of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) will be digitally searchable at the click of a button thanks to a text recognition project by the Huygens Institute and various partners.
Digitation project answers questions about Dutch colonial trade in minutes
A VOC bond from 1632
Dutch historians have been awarded a €3.8m grant to digitise a large part of the 25 million surviving handwritten documents from the business administration of the Dutch East Indies (VOC) company.
The aim of the project, dubbed ‘Globalise’, is to not only to make the information accessible to historians and others across the globe but to present them with the answers to their questions in minutes, albeit in 17
th or 18
th century Dutch.
The most important documents, the General Missives, which contain summaries of the reports made by VOC officials to their Dutch masters, are kept at the national archive in The Hague and have long since been published in book form. These comprise 200,000 documents which have been partly digitised but are not easy to navigate.
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Amsterdam, 21 May 2021 - The Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands receives 3.8 million euro from the Dutch Research Council for the GLOBALISE project to provide digital access to the UNESCO archive of the VOC. Together with the VU Amsterdam, the National Archives, the International Institute for Social History and the Humanities Cluster of the Royal Netherlands Academy, the Huygens Institute for History of the Netherlands is building a state-of-the-art scientific infrastructure, enabling a better understanding of colonial history, the Dutch East India Company and the early-modern histories of countries and cultures of the Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago Worlds.
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