DB:CCC - Diamonds in Borneo: Commodities as Concepts in Context 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 we want 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 want 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.

1. Diamonds in Borneo: Commodities as
Concepts in Context
Karin Hofmeester, International Institute of Social History; Ashkan Ashkpour,
International Institute of Social History; Katrien Depuydt, Instituut voor de
Nederlandse Taal; Jesse de Does, Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal; Martin
Reynaert, Meertens Institute

2. Goals
• Fill the gap in our knowledge on diamonds in Borneo
• Develop a workflow usable for other commodity researchers
• Test various CLARIAH components

4. From OCR to Structured Data
https://www.dbnl.org/tekst/levi010geil01_01/index.php

5. From Scans to structured data
1. OCR with Finereader 11  Abbyy XML
2. Generic conversion Abbyy XML  TEI
3. Specific structure extraction  TEI with article structure and
tagged headwords and headword translations in French,
English and German
4. Manual correction of headwords and translations in Oxygen

6. Towards a List of Concepts
Enriching the Encyclopedia data with:
• DiaMaNT
By linking concepts to DiaMaNT, there is an expansion of the search lexicon with
additional synonyms and historical variant spellings
Vb. Afzet {debiet, vente} ; juweel {bijou, bijouterie}…
• Place names Borneo
498 geographical entities extracted from 6 different sources.
Includes: historical and contemporary spelling variants, synonyms and references to
rivers and mountains.
• Dutch Ships and Sailors (DSS) and Bookkeeper-General Batavia (BGB)
External sources containing variables of interest such as: place names in Borneo,
voyages (including departure and cargo information) and Diamond related concepts.

8. Query and Build
Create various
(combined) Queries
Icons made by Freepik from https://www.flaticon.com
Build a
corpus

9. Why queries?
● Lots of irrelevant hits when you look for ‘diamant’

10. Helpful tools
● Selected terms from Diamond encyclopedia
● Selected list of place names Borneo
● Adapted version scripts Serpens

11. Limitation of results with help of place
names
http://jsru.kb.nl/sru/sru?version=1.2&operation=searchRetrieve&recordSchema=ddd&x-
collection=DDD_artikel&startRecord=0&maximumRecords=1&query=date+within+%2201-01-1800+31-12-
1939%22+AND+(("Tandjong"+OR+"Pontianak"+OR+"Simpang"+OR+"Samarinda"+OR+"Balikpapan"+OR+"Karimat
a"+OR+"Balmoral"+OR+"Sambas"+OR+"Pappan"+OR+"Negara"+OR+"Bangkalan"+OR+"Bandjar"+OR+"Tengah"+
OR+"Banjermassing"+OR+"Martapoera"+OR+"Sarawak"+OR+"Tjempaka"+OR+"Bandjermassing"+OR+"Marabaha
n"+OR+"Montrado"+OR+"Sandakan"+OR+"Malano"+OR+"Landak"+OR+"Kendangan"+OR+"Pengaron"+OR+"Mam
pawa"+OR+"Sanggau"+OR+"Barabei"+OR+"Pamangkat"+OR+"Sinkawang"+OR+"Tanah+Laut"+OR+"Tanah-
Laut"+OR+"Bandjarmassing"+OR+"Riam+Kanan"+OR+"Tjampaka"+OR+"Pegattan"+OR+"Tandjoengpoera"+OR+"
Ngabang"+OR+"Tabanio"+OR+"Riam+Kiwa"+OR+"Darvel+Bay"+OR+"Sekadau"+OR+"Kalimantan"+OR+"Vlakke+H
oek"+OR+"Kotawaringin"+OR+"Panisse"+OR+"Jesselton"+OR+"Pontein"+OR+"Katingan"+OR+"Elopura"+OR+"M
arudu"+OR+"Passara"+OR+"Batti-
Batti"+OR+"Mataon"+OR+"Tabaran"+OR+"Kotaringin"+OR+"Kottaringin")+AND+(diamant+OR+diamanten+OR+dia
mants+OR+djamant+OR+dyamanten+OR+diamant+OR+diamanten))

12. Results more relevant: