Colonial heritage in Switzerland

Colonial heritage in Switzerland

Introduction

Switzerland had no colonies of its own - yet there were a number of Swiss involved in slavery, the slave trade, and colonialism activities between the 16th and the 19th centuries. Swiss trading companies, banks, city-states, family enterprises, mercenary contractors, soldiers, and private individuals participated in and profited from the commercial, military, administrative, financial, scientific, ideological, and publishing activities necessary for the creation and the maintenance of the Transatlantic slavery economy. In this project, focusing on the Caribbean Community member states, we are interested in discovering the trace of the colonial past of Switzerland.

Our primary source is the CARICOM Compilation Archive written by Hans Fässler, MA Zurich University, a historian from St.Gallen (Switzerland).

Project Plan and Milestones

Date	Task	Completion
Week 4 (07.10)	Research on potential project ideas. Initial project ideas presentation.	✓
Week 6 (21.10)	Study similar projects for possible methodology. Decide on primary sources for this project. Study NLP pipelines and text understanding methods that can be applied to the project.	✓
Week 10 (25.11)	Step I Work on extracting name, origin, date, places, and colonial activities from the corpus. Compile a list of slave-ships Step II Decide on how to implement the visualization of the extracted information.
Week 11 (02.12)	Step I Finish data extraction and clean the data for visualization. Step II Set up a website for visualization, mapping information based on geographic location. Step III Compare names from our database with Swiss street names database Compare names from our database with Dictionary of Swiss History
Week 12 (09.12)	Step II Contact the author of this archive, historian Hans Fässler, for validation of the project. Work on visualization, link individual/companies colonial location with origin Add a feature to see only the items with material traces Step III Compare names from our database with Wikidata database Use web scraping to enrich the material traces if low level results with other sources (less than 20% of entities)
Week 13 (16.12)	Step II Refine website functions based on the feedback from the historian. Overall Assess the approach of the project. Write the report.
Week 14 (22.12)	Overall Finish project and website, final presentation

Methodology

Text Understanding tools: Stanford NER, NLTK

Links

Github repository: Colonial-heritage-in-Switzerland

Primary source: caricom archives

Secondary sources: Dictionnaire historique de la Suisse DHS, swissNAME3d