Digital Resources

The Institute for European Global Studies has created multiple new digital resources in the course of its research programs and collaborations that are increasingly being made available to the global research community. Through its participation in the hasdai partnership with CERN, the Institute has pioneered the use of long-term preservation for social sciences and humanities applications, which was originally developed by and for the physical sciences community. As a result its outputs are now routinely filed as Zenodo deposits, openly accessible internationally, and its research workflows are automatically converted into Invenio corpora. This approach builds on existing large-scale technology investment, especially by the European Commission, the U.S. National Science Foundation, and major particle physics laboratories, and has established state-of-the-art and sustainable infrastructure for humanities corpora.

The Institute's research activities focus on application of the latest annotation techniques – leading to annotation as 'primary research asset,' through its collaboration with Data Futures GmbH and the Preservation Techniques, Technologies and Policies group of the international Research Data Alliance (RDA). EIB's research workflows now routinely employ video annotation, multilingual image annotation and large-scale IIIF-based data extraction from historical text corpora.

The Global History of the Sandgrube: Research Project on the Chinese Room

In a new research project at the Institute for European Global Studies, the research groups "Global History of Europe" and "Digital Humanities" explore the Sandgrube's Chinese Room. Using the Sandgrube, where the Institute has been located since 2019, as a material artefact, the groups investigate the traces left by centuries of global exchange in a local Basel environment.

FOCAL: The Asia Directories Database

A new tool, the Asia Directories Database, now offers access to the names of approximately one million persons registered in The Foreign Residents Lists of the Asia Directories and Chronicles. Covering the entire area of East Asia and nearly one century (1863 to 1941), this publicly available data resource offers a unique insight into the dynamics and shifting societies formed by (primarily Western) foreign residents.

Global Information at a Glance

This research project analyses the development of a global information society in context of the connections of worldwide markets through the lens of the "Directory and Chronicle". This book, first published in 1863, aimed to cover all information which was needed by the community of foreigners living in Asia.

Picture: Book cover of the "Directory and Chronicle", 1885

Hinode Manga-Map of 1932

This project is providing a complete reading of the inscriptions of the Hinode Manga-Map of 1932, with almost 1000 annotations including original Japanese script, romanization and German translation.

Asian Directories & Chronicles Foreign Residents Benchmark

This repository contains a benchmark dataset based on the listings of foreign residents in the 1896, 1899 and 1934, 1937 volumes of the Asian Directories & Chronicles serial. The serial was published annually by The Hong Kong Daily Press between 1863 and 1941.

ADC-Treaties

ADC-Treaties is a repository of legislation, treaties and guidelines in Asia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Global Politics on Screen

This research addresses the efforts of the League of Nations to investigate the Sino-Japanese conflict in Manchuria. It examines Japanese silent propaganda films from the early 1930s about the work of the so-called Lytton Commission of the League of Nations, which visualizes events of international politics for a global public. The project is based on work conducted before deployment of EIB's preservation infrastructure and new work is will make it more broadly accessible.

Picture: The Lytton Commission examining a railway, Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Printed Markets. Information, Data and News in the Basel "Avis-Blatt", 1729–1845

Using Basel as an example, this project examines a new form of marketplace that emerged in Europe during the 17th century and, for the most part, in the 18th century: the printed advertising market of the so-called "Intelligenzblätter". It employs digital history and data science methods to systematically open up an extensive serial source and to shine a light on the socioeconomic transformations of the "Sattelzeit".

Picture: Front Page of the Basel Avisblatt, 6 January 1746. (The Basel Avisblatt (1746), University Library Basel, p. 1.)

Nach oben