Current Project: Diamonds in Borneo: Commodities as Concepts in Context

CLARIAH Project by Karin Hofmeester, International Institute of Social History

For comparative research on globalization (understood as the intensified circulation of people, commodities, and ideas,) historians currently study texts ‘manually’ deriving lists of concepts, such as places, products, and labour types, as well as related characteristics explaining changes in these concepts.

To do this more efficiently this project aims to transpose our existing lists of concepts to vocabularies and use those to derive structured information from texts like travelogues, newspapers, trade papers etc. For this particular project we are working to improve our concept lists on diamonds, using existing linked data and adding data from the Geillustreerde encyclopaedie der diamantnijverheid.

Based on a selection of texts from Delpher and with help of NLP tools like Entity recognition, classification & linking, and the Ontotagger, we hope to detect the mining, manufacturing, and trading places and people in Borneo up until now a blind spot in our knowledge about the global diamond commodity chain.

For further information, see the Clariah website.

Past Events

• Workshop: “Commodity Frontiers in Latin America”
  36th International Congres of the Latin American Studies Association - Barcelona
  May 23-26, 2018 
• Workshop: “Colonial Agricultural Modernities: Capital, Concepts, Circulations" - program available here
  Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin
  March 22-23, 2018  
• 4th International Workshop: "Commodity Frontiers and Global Capitalist Expansion: Social, Ecological and Resource Policy Implications". Conference report
  Zayed University, Dubai
  December 6-7, 2017 
• Commodity Frontiers in Historical Capitalism
  Double panel at the Third Annual Conference of the World-Ecology Research Network
  Binghamton University, Binghamton, NY
  July 21-22, 2017
• Seminar: "Commodity Frontiers" / Fronteras de la mercantilización                                                           Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, Consejo de Facultad, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú 
  Lima, Peru                                                                                                                                                               June 26-27, 2017
• International Workshop: "Global Commodity Frontiers in a Comparative Historical Context, International Workshop"
  London, UK
  December 9-10, 2016
• Conference: "Global Capitalism and Commodity Frontiers, Conference at the International Institute of Social History"
  Amsterdam, the Netherlands
  December 4-5, 2015
• Panel: Relations of Land and Labor in Commodity Frontier Zones, 16^th to 20th century
  ENIUGH Conference, Paris, France
  September 4, 2014
• Conference: "Capitalist Growth, Commodity Frontiers, Sustainability"
  Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University
  October 24-25, 2014​​​​