Person Name Vocabulary: For findable, interoperable and reusable person data in rdf

Poster introducing the Person Name Vocabulary (PNV) and its use to the Digital Humanities Communit

Transforming historical research practices – a digital infrastructure for the VOC archives (GLOBALISE)

The GLOBALISE project aims to unlock c. 5 million pages from the archives of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) for in-depth research. Funded by the Dutch Research Council1, GLOBALISE is a collaboration of the Huygens Institute, the International Institute of Social History and the Digital Infrastructure department of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Humanities Cluster; the Computational Linguistics & Text Mining Lab of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam; the CREATE research programme of the University of Amsterdam; and the Dutch National Archives. The project team consists of historians, computational linguists, data specialists and software developers. We expect to deliver a first prototype of the research infrastructure in early 2024; all tools and data will be open access available by the end of 2026. As all of this will be a large-scale undertaking, we invite researchers and the wider interested public to work with us, especially to provide data, help annotate or enrich the VOC materials. In return, they get early access to our data and tools. More information about contributing to GLOBALISE can be found on the project website: https://globalise.huygens.knaw.nl/

The Wind in Our Sails: Developing a Reusable and Maintainable Dutch Maritime History Knowledge Graph

Digital sources are more prevalent than ever but effectively using them can be challenging. One core challenge is that digitized sources are often distributed, thus forcing researchers to spend time collecting, interpreting, and aligning different sources. A knowledge graph can accelerate research by providing a single connected source of truth that humans and machines can query. During two design-test cycles, we convert four data sets from the historical maritime domain into a knowledge graph. The focus during these cycles is on creating a sustainable and usable approach that can be adopted in other linked data conversion efforts. Furthermore, our knowledge graph is available for maritime historians and other interested users to investigate the daily business of the Dutch East India Company through a unified portal

Sailors' lives

Collection of short (collective) biographies of seafarers who sailed on Dutch merchant marine ships (17th - 20th century)