Andreas Weber

• PhD
• Associate professor at University of Twente

Large collections of historical biodiversity expeditions are housed in natural history museums throughout the world. Potentially they can serve as rich sources of data for cultural historical and biodiversity research. However, they exist as only partially catalogued specimen repositories and images of unstructured, non-standardised, hand-written t...

Locations of Knowledge in Dutch Contexts brings together scholars who shed light on the ways locations gave shape to scientific knowledge practices in the Dutch Republic and the Kingdom of the Netherlands. This interdisciplinary volume uses four hundred years of Dutch history as a laboratory to investigate spatialized understandings of the history...

The sheer variety and size of Dutch scientific collections of Indonesia’s flora and fauna are unique in the world. Gathered over the last two hundred years, they represent a shared European legacy of natural historical research and its colonial context. To understand how the entanglement of transnational and transimperial networks and actors within...

Next to providing a more general overview of the field, this chapter encourages readers to take natural history collections as analytical starting point for their inquiry into the field of natural history and empire. In particular large-scale digitization and the digital enrichment of collections and archives in the field of natural history, provid...

Researchers interested in the colonial provenance of European natural history collections find themselves currently in an ambiguous position. On one hand, there is a fast-growing amount of digital services that provide them with statistics, names and lists of objects that have been accumulated in former colonial areas and are now stored in natural...

As a result of the colonial entanglements of many natural history collections, much of the world's biodiversity heritage is housed in Europe. Increasingly, natural history institutions have started to address this history. However, computational methods for analysing large collections often consist in static visualisations of collection provenance....

This introduction to the special issue “Digital Natural and Cultural Heritage” has two aims: First, it briefly introduces individual contributions and explains how they relate to one another. Second, it explains our motivation for producing a special issue aimed at bridging the perceived gap between the fields of digital natural and cultural herita...

This talk outlines a vision for Common European Data Spaces, proposed by the European Commission, where FAIR principles (Wilkinson et al. 2016) and FAIR Digital Objects (FDOs) (De Smedt et al. 2020, Schwardmann 2020) can play a role in bringing together research infrastructures, data aggregators and other stakeholders working with curated objects i...

Natural history museums and herbaria in the Global North owe much of their authority to plants, animals and minerals collected in the Global South. This unequal distribution of the planet’s natural heritage is the historical result of intimate and often invisible linkages between natural history repositories and evolving schemes of colonial exploit...

A major goal of curating natural history collections or cultural artefacts in museums, herbaria, libraries and archives is to create diverse and rich narratives around them. Their investigation by computational methods enables scholars to discover new connections and patterns, and helps to answer a whole range of research questions that were previo...

This essay examines how local draughtsmen using their visual expertise shaped natural historical knowledge production in colonial Indonesia in the early nineteenth century. The persons at the core of this essay are Tsing Wang Ho and Pieter van Oort, both draughtsmen who worked for the Natuurkundige Commissie voor Nederlandsch-Indië (Committee of Na...

published in Indische Letteren, issue of December 2022. Full citation: Van Zanen, S. and Weber, A., “Schreeuwende apen, zingende vogels en fluitende kogels: Natuuronderzoek op Sumatra in oorlogstijd (1833-1834),” in: Indische Letteren (2021), 278-299.

Pieter van Oort, geboren in 1804 in Utrecht, was een van de meest getalenteerde Nederlandse tekenaars van dieren en planten van zijn tijd. In opdracht van koning Willem I vertrok hij in 1825 naar de toenmalige Nederlandse koloniën in Zuidoost-Azië, om daar in dienst van de Natuurkundige Commissie de flora en fauna vast te leggen. Met de natuuronder...

Pieter van Oort, geboren in 1804 in Utrecht, was een van de meest getalenteerde Nederlandse tekenaars van dieren en planten van zijn tijd. In opdracht van koning Willem I vertrok hij in 1825 naar de toenmalige Nederlandse koloniën in Zuidoost-Azië, om daar in dienst van de Natuurkundige Commissie de flora en fauna vast te leggen. Met de natuuronder...

In the late eighteenth century, producers of writing paper in the Netherlands lived in a world full of material sensibilities. On the one hand, they profited from the heavy consumption of writing paper by capitalising on their reputation of being able to supply customers all over the world with large quantities of writing paper. On the other hand,...

The full proceedings can be found here: http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2810/ TOC: Preface Paper 1: Emergent Archives and Crowdsourced Narratives: Two Development Stories from the Queensland State Library - Seth Ellis | Paper 2: Linked Data and Holocaust Era Art Markets: Gaps and Dysfunctions in the Knowledge Supply Chain - Laurel Zuckerman | Paper 3: Re...

In this paper we analyse the classification of zoological illustrations. Historically, zoological illustrations were the modus operandi for the documentation of new species, and now serve as crucial sources for long-term ecological and biodiversity research. By employing computational methods for classification, the data can be made amenable to res...

Open access: https://dh.brill.com/nco/

Bijdrage aan Wonderkamer, Magazine voor Wetenschapsgeschiedenis 1 (2020), zie ook: http://www.gewina.nl/wonderkamer/

This short paper describes how MONK, a machine-learning driven handwriting recognition system, can be used to rapidly index a heterogeneous handwritten collection with the help of volunteers. We discuss the setup and results of an event which saw volunteers come together to enrich a subset of the digitized Prize paper collection, a collection of hi...

We are pleased to announce a call for papers for the international conference Collect & Connect: Archives and Collections in a Digital Age. The conference will be held at Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden from 23-24 November 2020. More information about the CfP and the link to the submission system can be found here: http://cfp.makingsensepro...

Introduction to "Locations of Knowledge in Dutch Contexts", edited by Fokko Jan Dijksterhuis, Andreas Weber and Huib Zuidervaart

With the help of artificial intelligence-powered services and tools the heritage sector is working towards the next level of access to and (re)use of digitized collections. In recent years libraries, archives and museums have started to apply machine learning and advanced knowledge bases to contextually enrich digitized objects, audio-visual conten...

Biodiversity research expeditions to the globe’s most biodiverse areas have been conducted for several hundred years. Natural history museums contain a wealth of historical materials from such expeditions, but they are stored in a fragmented way. As a consequence links between the various resources, e.g., specimens, illustrations and field notes, a...

In this paper, scientific species names from images of handwritten species observations are automatically recognised and annotated with semantic concepts, so that they can be used for document retrieval and faceted search. Until now, automated semantic annotation of such named entities was only applied to printed or digital text. We employ a two-st...

“Historians Should Explore Rather Than Sticking with What They Know”: Interview with Professor Harold Cook, Brown University - Volume 43 Special Issue - Tristan Mostert, Andreas Weber

Open access: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/701651

Poster abstract for track Advances in eScience for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the 2018 IEEE 14th International Conference on e-Science in Amsterdam (29 October - 1 November). For published full abstract click here: https://doi.org/10.1109/eScience.2018.00129

Poster abstract for track Advances in eScience for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the 2018 IEEE 14th International Conference on e-Science in Amsterdam (29 October - 1 November). For published full abstract click here: https://doi.org/10.1109/eScience.2018.00113 -- WINNER OF BEST POSTER AWARD!

Contributors to this theme issue examine the history of the life sciences at the Botanical Gardens in Bogor (Kebun Raya Bogor) in Indonesia. Each of the essays in this theme issue focusses on a major transformation that the garden, its networks, and staff underwent in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Before summarizing individual contributio...

This essay provides a fresh view on early the history of the botanical garden Buitenzorg by zooming in on the activities of the garden’s first and second directors: Caspar Georg Carl Reinwardt and Carl Ludwig Blume. In particular under Blume’s aegis the garden was under constant threat, which eventually led to the temporary closure of the garden in...

Museums, archives and digital libraries make increasing use of Semantic Web technologies to enrich and publish their collection items. The contents of those items, however, are not often enriched in the same way. Extracting named entities within historical manuscripts and disclosing the relationships between them would facilitate cultural heritage...

Geographical and taxonomical referencing of specimens and documented species observations from within and across natural history collections is vital for ongoing species research. However, much of the historical data such as field books, diaries and specimens, are challenging to work with. They are computationally inaccessable, refer to historical...

Large and important parts of cultural heritage are stored in archives that are difficult to access, even after digitization. Documents and notes are written in hard-to-read historical handwriting and are often interspersed with illustrations. Such collections are weakly structured and largely inaccessible to a wider public and scholars. Traditional...

https://brill.com/view/book/edcoll/9789004325562/B9789004325562_010.xml

Full text of this essay review can be found here: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/663563 Contact me if you have difficulties to get hold of it. DOI: 10.1353/jwh.2017.0016

Full text can be found here: https://research.utwente.nl/en/publications/wood-excrements-and-hydrometers-chemical-knowledge-and-the-govern

This paper presents initial findings of the research project Making Sense of Illustrated Handwritten Archives and demonstrates the recognition capabilities of the MONK artificial intelligence system developed since the early 2000s at the institute of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Engineering (ALICE) at Groningen University (Van der Zant et...

This essay analyses the career of the German chemist and government functionary Caspar Georg Carl Reinwardt (1773-1854) through the layered lens of governance and management. By conceptualizing governance as the historical result of the interaction between locally situated accumulation and management projects and the ‘metropolitan’ assessment of th...

See also: http://www.sehepunkte.de/2014/11/22660.html

The life of the German chemist-apothecary Caspar Georg Carl Reinwardt (1773-1854) offers a fascinating window on Dutch culture and society in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By providing an in-depth analysis of his multi-faceted career in the Netherlands and the Malay Archipelago, this study sheds light on the co-evolutionary ch...

Dieser Beitrag konzentriert sich auf Adriaan David Cornets de Groot jun., der im Frühjahr 1819 von der niederländischen Kolonialregierung an den javanischen Fürstenhof nach Surakarta berufen wurde. Wie von der Kolonialregierung erhofft, etablierte er sich dort rasch als multilingualer Grenzgänger, der bei auftretenden Spannungen zwischen den lokale...

In the years after its foundation in 1814, the United Kingdom of the Netherlands witnessed the emergence of several new sites where natural history—the study of naming, describing and classifying plants, animals and minerals—was carried out. These new sites, such as the Rijksmuseum van Natuurlijke Historie (National Museum for Natural History), fou...