‘Chains of the Past’ sits at the frontier of digital historical research. By processing thousands of historical handwritten documents, this project builds a data infrastructure that will support future research into the lives of enslaved and free people in the former Dutch colonies. As a data specialist, you will help lay the foundations for this new and innovative research landscape. Applying already existing technical data extraction methods to colonial archives requires creativity and critical thinking.
Historical sources are fragmented, shaped by colonial power relations, and often difficult to interpret computationally. Your role is to bridge the worlds of programming and historical interpretation: developing robust entity recognition methods while remaining attentive to the historical context that gives meaning to the data. We therefore seek someone who is eager to learn and likes working in interdisciplinary teams and settings. If desired, we are happy to support you to develop your own research ideas.
Using and further developing existing data extraction models in R and/or Python, you will help connect individual observations from different sources, enabling the reconstruction of life histories of both enslaved and free people in the colonial context. Together with key stakeholders such as the Dutch Digital Heritage Network (NDE) and the National Archives of the Netherlands, Suriname and Curaçao, you will also develop a strategy to generate sustainable and persistent identifiers (PIDs) for historical person reconstructions. These identifiers will make it possible to easily follow people across multiple archival sources and colonial contexts. To support this work, you will develop and publish Linked Open Data (LOD) that ensures the data can be reused and connected within the wider digital heritage ecosystem.