The Dutch Veterans Memoires Work Bench:  Bridging the gap between a traditional and computational reading of memoirs

1. Abstract

Dutch veterans have contributed to a broad collection of published memoirs on the topic of the independence war with Indonesia between 1945 and 1949. The Centre for Digital Scholarship has processed the corpus of 650 memoirs into machine readable text via OCR, and created a series of python scripts in a Jupyter Notebook environment. As two researchers, one specialised in text mining, and the other in military and digital history, we want to explore how we can encourage traditional historians to engage with these sources with text mining tools via a series of workshops. in our talk we inted to expand on the feasibility of developing a model for the integration of traditional and computational approaches to analyzing military memoirs. This could be of added value for the integraton of digital methods in the traditional history curriculum and research trajectory.