NDR Core was born out of neccessity. We needed a system to present the Asia Directories and the DPCL data. After that we were lucky enough to always have use cases during the development of the first publicly released version.
The Asia Directories Database
In 1863 a small booklet with a long title left the “Daily Press” office at Wyndham Street in Hongkong, The Chronicle & Directory for China, Japan & The Phillippines. The preface declared the publisher’s purpose to be nothing less than “to make the work a chronicle of every official document which affects the political or commercial arrangements of Western nations with China and Japan”. Under the preface lies the signature of the “Daily Press" Office, one of Hongkong’s oldest English newspapers, which, in the 1860s, was important enough to ask its readers for support in the endeavor of making the conditions of trade with East Asia transparent. The service obviously met a great need – subsequently, more and more voluminous issues appeared each year, until the Japanese occupation of Hongkong in 1941 ended any further publication.
To give adequate insight into the increasing territorial coverage of the series, we need only quote the title of the volume published in 1937: The Directory & Chronicle of China, Japan, Korea, Indo-China, Straits Settlements, Malaya, Siam, Netherlands India, Borneo, The Philippines, &c. with which are incorporated “The China Directory” and “The Hongkong Directory and Hong List for the Far East”. During its almost 80 years in circulation, the annual publication series appeared under a variety of slightly different titles that reflected not only its expanding geographic scope but also its continuously enlarged program aimed at providing all information needed by the diverse communities of foreigners living throughout East Asia. (from: https://www.asia-directories.org/focal/)
The Divisive Power of Citizenship
This website accompanies research conducted by Christian Futter between 2018 and 2022 as part of the SNF Divisive Power of Citizenship project of the Institute for European Global History, Basel. DPCL has gathered archival sources internationally relating to European citizens resident in Indochina during World War II, including material recently released by the French Government, and analyzed them using novel digital methods.
The British Chamber Of Commerce for Switzerland
The here shown database builds on the never before analyzed source material of the BSCC. It contains extensive minutes of meetings, periodicals, correspondence and lists of members as well as annual reports. The main archival source for the database are membership directories, so called Trade Indexes which were issued yearly and specify addresses, industry sectors, goods and services for each member.
After World War II, the BSCC worked with considerable expense in term of personnel and financial resources compared with the usual trade index on a more detailed index, which also included non-members and was intended to record British-Swiss trade relations as precisely as possible. This so called “Index of Swiss Agents representing United Kingdom Firms” has referencing entries from over 3,000 British and Swiss actors with respective locations and over 1,400 traded goods and services. Making this network visible will sharpen the research focus on individual connections and the geographical distribution of actors and goods.
Printed Markets - The Basel Avisblatt 1729-1844
"Printed Markets" is a research project on a new form of marketplace that emerged in Europe during the seventeenth and, for the most part, in the eighteenth century: the printed advertising market of the so-called "Intelligenzblätter" (intelligencers).
Using the example of the Basel Avisblatt (published 1729-1844/45), "Printed Markets" employs digital history and data science methods to systematically open up an extensive serial source, to shine a light on the socioeconomic transformations of the "Sattelzeit": The Avisblatt reflects myriads of ways to organise economic exchange, to interlink persons of complementary interests, to spin the socioeconomic web of a town in transition, from early modernity to the industrial age.
"Printed Markets" is a project of the Department of History at the University of Basel and is financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation SNSF. The project is led by Prof. Dr. Susanna Burghartz.