Necessary Reunions (Software)

Necessary Reunions Remarrying Maps to Text and Reconceptualizing Histories of Early Modern Kerala Maps and textual sources in the Dutch East India Company (VOC) archives were meant to be together. Maps were vital for understanding textual information about places. Written sources, in turn, enriched knowledge from maps. Previously, information from these sources could not be reintegrated because no suitable techniques existed to reunify them. Today, emerging techniques of georeferencing on maps and machine-generated transcriptions on text and maps make this possible. This project applied these methods to the VOC archives on early modern Kerala, India, enabling us to reconceptualize Kerala's early modern topography and support writing new histories of the region. This repository contains the software developed for the Necessary Reunions project, as well as documentation and data to reproduce the results. The application is available at necessaryreunions.org. Features The application provides three main tools: Map Viewer (re:Charted) — An interactive viewer for exploring annotated VOC maps of Kerala from the collections of the National Archives in The Hague. The viewer displays historical maps served via IIIF alongside georeferenced overlays (powered by Allmaps) and supports browsing of automatically generated annotations, including handwritten text recognition (HTR) results and computer-vision-detected iconography. GAVOC Explorer — A geographical exploration tool for the Grote Atlas van de Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (GAVOC). Historical place names from the atlas are linked to modern coordinates and names, forming a historical thesaurus of place names that can be explored on a modern map and queried via an API. Gazetteer — A gazetteer of place information for early modern Kerala, derived from the geotagged annotations created in the Map Viewer and combining data from textual archives and thirty maps from the Leupe collection. The gazetteer includes historical and modern place names, coordinates, and links to external geographical datasets. Technology Built with Next.js 16, React 19, Leaflet, OpenSeadragon, Allmaps, AnnoRepo (W3C Web Annotation), and Tailwind CSS. Deployed on Netlify. Credits Authors: Jona Schlegel (Huygens Institute / archaeoINK), Leon van Wissen (University of Amsterdam), Manjusha Kuruppath (Huygens Institute)Contributors: Dung Pham (Huygens Institute), Meenu Rabecca (International Institute of Social History) Funding This project was funded by the NWO Open Competition XS grant, file number 406.XS.24.02.046 (March–December 2025), and conducted at the Huygens Institute. Related Projects GLOBALISE — Data created in the Necessary Reunions project is part of the GLOBALISE project and will be available and further used there. Combatting Bias — Guidelines, vocabulary, and a toolkit to identify and combat biases in VOC archival data and methods. MapReader — Computer vision techniques for map analysis, whose methods were adapted for this project. Loghi — HTR toolkit developed at the Huygens Institute, used to generate transcriptions of the VOC archives. License Software: European Union Public Licence v. 1.2 (EUPL-1.2). Data: Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0. Citation If you use this software, please cite it as: Schlegel, J., van Wissen, L., & Kuruppath, M. (2026). Necessary Reunions (Software) (v1.0). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18787726 If you use the data in this repository, please also acknowledge the data contributors: Schlegel, J., van Wissen, L., Kuruppath, M., Pham, D., & Rabecca, M. (2026). Necessary Reunions (Software and Data) (v1.0). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18787726 BibTeX @software{schlegel_2026_necessary_reunions, author = {Schlegel, Jona and van Wissen, Leon and Kuruppath, Manjusha}, title = {Necessary Reunions (Software)}, year = 2026, version = {v1.0}, publisher = {Zenodo}, doi = {10.5281/zenodo.18787726}, url = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18787726} }