Unsilencing colonial archives via automated entity recognition

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.