Five million documents from the Dutch East India Company will be searchable starting on Wednesday, with an improved version of the database expected next year #archives nltimes.nl/2023/10/08/m... - ThreadSky

burmanphd.bsky.social • 513 days ago

Five million documents from the Dutch East India Company will be searchable starting on Wednesday, with an improved version of the database expected next year #archives
https://nltimes.nl/2023/10/08/millions-archived-voc-documents-now-searchable-online-including-slavery-records

Comments

jmcsms.bsky.social•513 days ago

Excellent - another reason to vote up Bluesky, info I'm interested in and not conspiraloon nonsense....

tomkimmerer.bsky.social•513 days ago

This is exciting. I’m going to look for my ancestors. They were, for many generations, Dutch ship captains carrying tropical goods from Indonesia (thankfully not in the slave trade).

adamrsweet.bsky.social•513 days ago

Awesome 👍

burmanphd.bsky.social•486 days ago

I'm not sure if I've ever seen so much interest about a new historical resource, database, or archive. That's wonderful! (For those of you who are curious about what all the fuss is about, here's a quick explainer.)

argakyan.bsky.social•499 days ago

The realist in me is assuming that it sounds like a lot, 5 million documents, but it was most likely a lot more - and a lot of documents inconvenient to the Dutch state were shredded or burned, not publicly accessible. Same as what the British did in "Operation Legacy".

cinemastrikesback.bsky.social•513 days ago

Great, I can finally find out what happened to that missing shipment of tea and pepper I’ve been waiting for this last couple of hundred years.

aricaschuett.bsky.social•512 days ago

@adeeweller.bsky.social you probably already know

dwebster.bsky.social•513 days ago

Great stuff, but very hard to contextualize documents without decent metadata. This does not look like the most effective way to digitize.

ichatterjea.bsky.social•513 days ago

@drangelasutton.bsky.social

yocum137.bsky.social•513 days ago

Someone jump to the end of the database to see if this comes true…

polyzelos.bsky.social•513 days ago

As a classicist, I'm a bit embarrassed that this is more than my entire corpus.

burmanphd.bsky.social•513 days ago

My biggest finished, published archival project used a corpus more than a thousand times smaller. I suspect we can't even imagine all of what this collection will enable.