Unsilencing colonial archives via automated entity recognition

Abstract

Purpose This paper aims to expand the scope and mitigate the biases of extant archival indexes. Design/methodology/approach The authors use automatic entity recognition on the archives of the Dutch East India Company to extract mentions of underrepresented people. Findings The authors release an annotated corpus and baselines for a shared task and show that the proposed goal is feasible. Originality/value Colonial archives are increasingly a focus of attention for historians and the public, broadening access to them is a pressing need for archives.