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This article has been accepted for publication by EUP in the IJHAC: International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing (https://www.euppublishing.com/loi/ijhac); International audience; Since the first ESFRI roadmap in 2006, multiple humanities Research Infrastructures (RIs) have been set up all over the European continent, supporting archaeologists (ARIADNE), linguists (CLARIN-ERIC), Holocaust researchers (EHRI), cultural heritage specialists (IPERION-CH) and others. These examples only scratch the surface of the breadth of research communities that have benefited from close cooperation in the European Research Area.While each field developed discipline-specific services over the years, common themes can also be distinguished. All humanities RIs address, in varying degrees, questions around research data management, the use of standards and the desired interoperability of data across disciplinary boundaries.This article sheds light on how cluster project PARTHENOS developed pooled services and shared solutions for its audience of humanities researchers, RI managers and policymakers. In a time where the convergence of existing infrastructure is becoming ever more important – with the construction of a European Open Science Cloud as an audacious, ultimate goal – we hope that our experiences inform future work and provide inspiration on how to exploit synergies in interdisciplinary, transnational, scientific cooperation.

Purpose This paper aims to describe the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) project's ongoing efforts to virtually integrate trans-national archival sources via the reconstruction of collection provenance as it relates to copy collections (material copied from one archive to another) and the co-referencing of subject and authority terms across material held by distinct institutions. Design/methodology/approach This paper is a case study of approximately 6,000 words length. The authors describe the scope of the problem of archival fragmentation from both cultural and technical perspectives, with particular focus on Holocaust-related material, and describe, with graph-based visualisations, two ways in which EHRI seeks to better integrate information about fragmented material. Findings As a case study, the principal contributions of this paper include reports on our experience with extracting provenance-based connections between archival descriptions from encoded finding aids and the challenges of co-referencing access points in the absence of domain-specific controlled vocabularies. Originality/value Record linking in general is an important technique in computational approaches to humanities research and one that has rightly received significant attention from scholars. In the context of historical archives, however, the material itself is in most cases not digitised, meaning that computational attempts at linking must rely on finding aids which constitute much fewer rich data sources. The EHRI project’s work in this area is therefore quite pioneering and has implications for archival integration on a larger scale, where the disruptive potential of Linked Open Data is most obvious.

This article tells the socio-political life story of the Banjarmasin diamond that is on display in the Rijksmuseum’s nineteenth-century colonial room. How the diamond came into the possession of the Dutch in 1859 was not entirely clear, although both in the Netherlands and in Indonesia it is cited as a typical example of ‘war booty’ and ‘looted art’. It is therefore used in debates about contemporary identity formation, like the Dutch approach to their violent colonial past and Indonesian post-colonial nation building. But the stone has more to tell: stories about war and violent subjugation, about resistance and the co-optation of the local rulers, about trade and monopolization and about colonial pretension. On the basis of a provenance report written as part of the Pilot Project Provenance Research on Objects of the Colonial Era, this article aims to shed more light on various moments in the diamond’s life story, from mining to exhibition. This also makes it clear that the present-day debate about its painful history and its possible restitution to Indonesia will be not the conclusion but a brand-new chapter in the diamond’s long socio-political history.

Why did the chairman of the “Jewish Council” in Belgium decide to resign from his position in late 1942 while his counterparts in the Netherlands, operating in a seemingly similar context, decided to remain in place until the council was dissolved? The choices and motivations of Jewish leaders during Nazi rule have been a persistent subject of discussion in Holocaust historiography for decades. To this day, research has overwhelmingly been conducted in national contexts, which has obscured a thorough understanding of the distinctive circumstances in which Jewish leaders operated. By exploring the different socio-historical premises on which the Jewish organizations in the Netherlands and Belgium were built, this article argues that the level of (dis)continuation with prewar communal structures played a significant role in the posture and choices of Jewish functionaries under Nazi occupation in these two countries.

This roundtable discussion between Christine Gundermann, Ewa Stańczyk, and Kees Ribbens, that addresses various aspects of the representation of World War II and the Holocaust in comics. These include the depiction of perpetrators, the use of comics in education, and the ways in which national contexts have affected the content and reception of these comics. Offering a rich historical overview of World War II and Holocaust comics, the three scholars highlight the predominant focus on victim figures in graphic narratives and discuss its implications for the representation of perpetrator figures. Furthermore, the participants explore the memorial and commemorative frameworks in which the World War II and Holocaust graphic narratives are situated.

This article examines the history of the Indonesian penal island of Nusakambangan between 1905 and 1942, based on quantitative and qualitative archival research. It compares labour conditions of inmates in Nusakambangan to those of workers in private plantations to intervene in a decades-long scholarly debate over the colonial state's role in managing labour conditions in the late colonial period. In a second part, this article describes everyday life on the island from an inmates’ perspective. While several imposed rounds of classification determined the inmates’ prospects of survival, corruption crucially created space for negotiation between inmates and guards, making the ‘ill-disciplined prison’ function.

Historical research can be enhanced by methods and resources from various disciplines, ranging from psychology to computer linguistics. With a creative and innovative perspective on »things we think we know«, Milan van Lange presents a computer-assisted historical investigation into the role of emotions in dealing with consequences of World War II in the Netherlands. By »emotion mining« digitised sources, van Lange shows where emotions were present and how they were expressed and discussed in the political engagement with people who experienced long-term effects of the war, such as former collaborators and war criminals, the resistance, and war victims.

This paper discusses best practices for sharing and reusing Ground Truth in Handwritten Text Recognition infrastructures, as well as ways to reference and acknowledge contributions to the creation and enrichment of data within these systems. We discuss how one can place Ground Truth data in a repository and, subsequently, inform others through HTR-United. Furthermore, we want to we want to suggest appropriate citation methods for HTR data, models, and contributions made by volunteers. Moreover, when using digitised sources (digital facsimiles), it becomes increasingly important to distinguish between the physical object and the digital collection. These topics all relate to the proper acknowledgement of labour put into digitising, transcribing, and sharing Ground Truth HTR data. This also points to broader issues surrounding the use of machine learning in archival and library contexts, and how the community should begin to acknowledge and record both contributions and data provenance.

During the occupation of the Netherlands, the Jewish population was systematically robbed and deprived of their property rights. Their economic and social isolation went hand in hand with a loss of social status, connectedness, security and identity, as homes were expropriated and furniture was confiscated. The process of depriving the Jews of everything they owned, which happened with such apparent ease by the seemingly all-powerful authorities, had a profound impact on the victims that went far beyond mere material loss. Furthermore, after the war, the restitution process confronted the survivors with bureaucratic procedures and formalities that evoked negative feelings among the persecuted victims. A strictly quantitative approach to compensation for the loss of furniture and other household items therefore seems to fall short. The view of loss as something that can be compensated with money does not take into account the psychological aspects of losing those personal possessions. This article pleads for a more qualitative approach to the subject of looting and restitution, free from the limitations imposed by the quantitative scope of official archives. The authors suggest that future research should relate more to the link between ‘dignity taking’ – a term that was coined by Bernadette Atuahene, professor of Law in Chicago – and ‘emotional loss’. Looking into property loss from an emotional perspective will teach us more about the fragility of settledness against the backdrop of occupation and persecution.

In 2011, the Syrian uprising rapidly escalated into a large-scale, complex, multi-dimensional civil war. Over a period of six years, the violence spread and became more intense, hundreds of thousan...

This article provides a critique of neoliberal feminism and argues for nuanced and critical approaches to the question of what constitutes feminist resistance. It focuses on visual artist Billie Zangewa’s creative practice and positions it within the longer history of how women have made use of traditional crafts, such as quilting and embroidery, as a means of expression and as a form of resistance. It positions Zangewa’s work alongside that of some of her feminist contemporaries who have also used thread and cloth in their work to reveal how the political is woven through the fabric of everyday life. I argue that in order to understand why Zangewa’s seemingly mundane, even bourgeois practice, has been framed and taken up as a form of feminist resistance, it is necessary to read her work through a historical lens that takes colonial dispossession and the brutal history of violence in Southern Africa into account. My readings of Zangewa’s work acknowledge the significance of the artist’s affirmation of care and self-love as resistance, as much as they point to the limits of a politics that valorises (unpaid) domestic work and fails to address the structural violence of capitalism.

This article treks through the timeworn remnants of Czechoslovakia’s Communist forced and correctional labour uranium camps in the Ore Mountains in the northwest Bohemian region of Jáchymov. These camps held tens of thousands of detainees, largely political prisoners convicted in sham trials or individuals sent there for re-education. Conditions were deplorable. Throughout the 1950s, the young Czechoslovak Communist regime compelled detainees to hard, life threatening labour and subjected them to maltreatment and arbitrary violence. This article traces some of the visible, invisible or overgrown artefacts of the former camps, as well as public as private memories about what happened there. It reflects on the current memoryscape of these forgotten places of human suffering and describes the aesthetics of these aging sites of atrocity.

Joe Sacco was interviewed as a keynote event during the second Amsterdam Comics Conference "Drawing Yourself in and out of It" in 2018. The acclaimed Maltese-American cartoonist spoke with three interviewers, each focusing on a particular aspect of his artistic and journalistic practice. Aimée de Jongh, a successful comics artist from the Netherlands, started by inviting Sacco to talk about his work in the field and his research habits. Comics scholar Rik Spanjers then engaged with Sacco about the ways in which he creates comics pages out of his experiences in the field. Historian Kees Ribbens concluded the interview by inquiring about the impact of Sacco's work on the conflicts and histories that it documents.

This article focuseson theworkofJewish Austrian photographerDoraKallmus,also known as Madame d’Ora,thenamesheassumedin1907whensheopenedwhatwastobecomeoneofthemostimportantphotographystudiosinVienna.In the 1920s, Kallmus opened a studio in Paris, where she excelled asan innovative fashion photographer and created portraits of the leading cultural figures of her time. This articlecentreson thedramaticshiftinthekindsofimages KallmuscreatedintheaftermathoftheSecondWorldWar,when she photographed peopleinrefugeecampsinAustria,andintheabattoirsofPariswhereKallmus spent the final decade of her life creating a series of photographs of dying and dead animals.Inordertounderstandthesephotographsandtheirpowerfulaffectivecharge,the article argues that itisnecessarytoconsiderthemnotonlyinrelationtothebodyofworkKallmusproducedbeforethewar,buttoreadtheminrelationtothecatastrophiceventsthateffectivelydestroyedbothherlife and the social world she inhabited. I read these images as an expression of Kallmus’ views on society and the practice and meaning of photography in the aftermath of the death camps,andcomparethisto the post-war thought of political theorist Hannah Arendt.Through my readings of Kallmus’ slaughterhouse series, I seek to show not only how the images reveal the photographer’s own psychic pain but also insist on a confrontation with the painful truth of the Shoah. The desire to avoid this painful reckoning, I argue, provides a reason for why this series has been largely ignored for the last six decades. This research forms part of research funded by the European Commission within the framework ofH2020-EU.1.3.2.MarieSkłodowska-CurieIndividual Fellowship for the projectFem-ResistGrant agreement ID: 838864

The first comprehensive, comparative study of the 'Jewish Councils' in the Netherlands, Belgium and France during Nazi rule. In the postwar period, there was extensive focus on these organisations' controversial role as facilitators of the Holocaust. They were seen as instruments of Nazi oppression, aiding the process of isolating and deporting the Jews they were ostensibly representing. As a result, they have chiefly been remembered as forms of collaboration. Using a wide range of sources including personal testimonies, diaries, administrative documents and trial records, Laurien Vastenhout demonstrates that the nature of the Nazi regime, and its outlook on these bodies, was far more complex. She sets the conduct of the Councils' leaders in their prewar and wartime social and situational contexts and provides a thorough understanding of their personal contacts with the Germans and clandestine organisations. Between Community and Collaboration reveals what German intentions with these organisations were during the course of the occupation, and allows for a deeper understanding of the different ways in which the Holocaust unfolded in each of these countries.

Postcolonial Vietnam is characterized by the interplay between necropolitics and necrosociality, as practiced respectively by the militarized state and a society that traditionally maintains relations with the dead. This interplay is key to understanding conflicts in Vietnam over the bones of unidentified war dead. On the one hand, such bones can challenge the state's sovereignty when it assumes the responsibility of taking care of them. On the other hand, they exert strong power over the living, prompting quests to place them in the right kinship and sociopolitical orders—or to erase their memory. This was made dramatically evident in 2011 by one set of human remains, allegedly belonging to a fallen soldier of the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese border war—a conflict that both sides’ governments prefer to forget. These remains illuminated the contention in the governing of war dead in postwar Vietnam. Moreover, they made evident the tension in anthropological inquiry about the ontology of human remains

Paramilitarism is key to understanding perpetration. Many studies of civil wars, counterinsurgencies, and genocides have demonstrated the central role of paramilitaries in the perpetration of violence against civilians. The organization of paramilitarism, from the top liaisons at the helm of the state, down to the killers who commit the violence is a crucial nexus to be examined. This special issue looks into paramilitarism in four different societies.

An analysis of impunity in colonial warfare

War crime researchers tricked Assad intelligence officers into confessing to the crime, and a chilling journalistic investigation followed.

Last week, The Hague Appeals Court completed its long-awaited hearings on old war crimes in Ethiopia. With ongoing conflict in Tigray, the Derg’s “Red Terror” of four decades ago may seem a story of the past. Yet this belated but unique universal jurisdiction trial has again aroused the pains of a period that still embitters both victims and the accused person, Eshetu Alemu. Historian Thijs Bouwknegt tells the story of man who still hopes for an acquittal as he is about to die.

On Tuesday 22 February, the District Court of The Hague closed its latest universal jurisdiction trial, against an Afghan-Dutch national alleged to have been head of the Pul-e-Charki prison in Kabul in the 1980s. But the trial has been rife with challenges around this war crimes probe.

Introduction to war comics

Introduction to the role of comics in propaganda

Drawing on extensive fieldwork at Buddhist institutions in Ho Chi Minh City, this article explicates the recent proliferation of Buddhist educational programs for urban youth and examines the contours of what I conceive as an emerging youth-oriented Buddhism in contemporary Vietnam. It sheds light on how Vietnamese youth is situated at the center of ongoing projects to craft new forms of urban Buddhist identity and community. In so doing, the article investigates the co-working between urban monastics and lay Buddhist youth to reconfigure Buddhist knowledge and practices to appeal to young people's dispositions, life experiences, and knowledge. I show how these creative endeavors rely on the revision of Buddhist texts using vernacular Vietnamese, the strategic deployment of new media technologies, and innovation of Buddhist pedagogies.

In this article I focus on an early but as yet unknown comic strip rendition of the last phase of the Holocaust which was produced in 1944 under the title ‘Nazi Death Parade’ by August M. Froehlich in an American pamphlet expressing the indignation at the many atrocities committed in previous years by the Nazis in Europe, which at the time was still largely occupied. In a relatively short narrative, the creator tried to illustrate the industrial murder process in the extermination camps on the basis of eyewitness accounts. The comic was in accordance with the ambition of the editors of this publication to make the American public aware of the nature and extent of the criminal intentions and activities of the Nazis who, in their view, should not remain unpunished. Central to this contribution is the question of what view was given of the Holocaust in this comic strip and in what context this visual representation was expressed. In addition, the question arises to what extent we can say something about the way in which this comic representation relates to later comics about this genocide.

This article explores the creation and curation of digital photographic heritage relating to the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa as a political project and examines the importance of the online circulation of historical photographs from private collections for public engagement with the re-opening of unresolved judicial cases concerning activists who were detained, tortured and murdered during apartheid. Focusing on the advocacy and commemoration practices relating to the re-opening of the inquest into the death of anti-apartheid activist Ahmed Timol, who was killed by the South African Security Police in October 1971, the article demonstrates that the curation of photographs included on the website relating to his life and murder can be understood as digital photographic heritage in formation. The article considers how the photographs constitute a form of virtual posthumous personhood and argues that Timol’s digital afterlife moves beyond commemoration and contributes to the ongoing struggle for justice in South Africa in the aftermath of apartheid.

After recognising Hmong Protestantism, the Vietnamese state continued an ‘anti conversion’ politics. It did so by encouraging the revival of what they saw as traditional Hmong religion as a bulwark against Protestantism and by enriching the range of cultural commodities for the growing ethno tourism market. For the non converts, not only their resistance of Christianity began to be redened as ‘the battle’ against Christianity, their belief and practices, up to then highly despised of by authorities, began to be restructured in order to gain new strength to rebound on the national and global religious stage. The new consciousness of the non Christian Hmong, however, worried the Vietnamese state. This contribution charts the annual competitions held since 2005 between Christian and non Christian groups in Lao Cai province in organising yearly Hmong communal rituals. It shows that what was meant to become a folklorised bulwark against Christianity became a new mêlée of ritual competition, as pioneering Hmong quickly seized the central stage. Ritual festivals thus become arenas of identity struggle in which none of the usual identity markers (secular, religious, communist, Christian, modern, traditional) can be taken at face value.

During the peak of the German expansion in World War II, more than 230 million people from Norway to Greece and from France to various regions inside the former Soviet Union lived under German occupation. This edited collection of primary sources for the first time gives an insight into the experiences of these ordinary people under German occupation, their everyday life and how this quickly became dominated by shortages (especially of food but also of other necessities such as medicine), the search for supplies and different strategies to fight scarcity. In addressing examples from all European countries under German occupation the collected sources give the first pan-European perspective on the history of shortage, malnutrition and hunger resulting from the war, occupation, and aggressive German exploitation policies.

On July 2, Dutch prosecutors demanded a 27-year prison sentence for Ahmad Al Khedr for a single war crime and participation in a terrorist group in Deir ez-Zor, Syria. At the heart of the case is the execution of a Syrian officer, caught on camera. Historian Thijs Bouwknegt tells the story of the first Syrian tried for murder before Dutch courts. While Dutch investigators still struggle to bring cases against government agents.

The 1994 genocide against Tutsi in Rwanda is characterised by both its mass victimisation and its mass participation. A criminogenic policy by extremists to destroy Tutsi civilians as a group created an extraordinarily large body of perpetrators of mass killing and many other atrocities. Immediately after the genocide was stopped, both Rwandan and international efforts commenced to pursue the criminal prosecution of over 1,000,000 Rwandans. In Rwanda, special chambers in military and conventional courts set out to investigate, prosecute and judge Rwandans suspected of genocide-related crimes; internationally, the United Nations set up the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (UNICTR). To complement and speed up the conventional accountability process, Rwanda also implemented a countrywide system of Inkiko Gacaca. Despite already bringing to justice over a million Rwandans, both in Rwanda and the UNICTR, many suspects had remained elusive abroad, or out of the UNICTR’s reach. Initially, some third countries (mainly in Europe and Canada) tried Rwandans for international crimes by application of the principle of universal jurisdiction. At the same time, Rwanda increasingly sought to try fugitives at home before the High Court Chamber for International Crimes and Cross Boarder Crimes (HCICC). This Article discusses Rwanda’s challenges in its process of seeking referral of cases from the UNICTR and extraditions from third states – including the Netherlands – and how those challenges were overcome with the financial and operational assistance of the Dutch Government.

This article examines the collaboration between the law firm of C.W. Baron van Heeckeren from Semarang and the Oei Tiong Ham Concern (OTHC). From the 1880s this Dutch law firm became the centre of a close-knit group of Dutch lawyer-entrepreneurs who through interlocking business directorships developed important sectors of the Javanese economy and the city of Semarang. In doing so Van Heeckeren and his associates teamed up with the Chinese business elite of the port-city. In particular they worked with the foremost Overseas Chinese capitalist, Major Oei Tiong Ham, developing profitable partnerships. The Dutch lawyers acted not only as his legal advisors, but developed his sugar empire as directors-shareholders, held major stakes in his shipping business and coolie trade, and profited from his opium trade. They moreover helped Oei Tiong Ham to acquire real estate and enterprises formerly belonging to powerful Chinese opium farmers and collaborated with him in developing infrastructural and housing projects. This article provides new and revealing details about how the business world of colonial Java worked during the early phase of Dutch economic imperialism and how the Chinese business elite seized the opportunities provided by the Dutch colonial state to advance their business interests.

This article analyses the dynamics of official and unofficial religious nationalism in the Vietnamese border town of Lào Cai. In 1979 it was one of many Vietnamese towns that were reduced to rubble during the short but bloody war between Vietnam and China. The normalization of Sino-Vietnamese relations in 1991 allowed a booming border trade that let Lào Cai prosper, while the painful memory of this war continued to haunt the town and the daily experiences of its residents, both humans and gods. Since the Vietnamese state forbids any official remembrance of the war, Lào Cai residents have found a religious way to deal with their war memories that skilfully evades state control. By analysing narratives about the fate of the gods and goddesses that reign in the Father God Temple and the Mother Goddess Temple—two religious institutions located right next to the border—this article shows that it is in the symbolism of the supernatural that one can find memories of the war and of the changing social landscape of Lào Cai and reconstruct its history.

Actual year of publication was 2022

This paper analyses digitized historical parliamentary proceedings on post-war welfare legislation aimed at alleviating the suffering of victims of the German occupation of the Netherlands. The history of this legislation has been described and analysed extensively in Dutch historiography. The political discussions and welfare policies it encompassed have become emblematic for a perceived ’emotional history’ of the post-war Netherlands. We take established views on these discussions, and their emotional nature, as a starting point for a distant reading exercise using (external) lexicon- based emotion mining. We show that the received wisdom concerning emotionality in post-war parliamentary discussions cannot be replicated using emotion mining techniques and discuss the consequences of this finding.

A concise history of Jewish life under German occupation of the Netherlands and the nazi-persecution of the Dutch Jews