News
Posthumus fellows awarded Open eScience Call 2025 funding for Rags2Riches project
In the most recent funding round, the netherlands eScience center awarded a substantial in-kind contribution to the project ‘From rags to riches: A pipeline for processing semi-structured handwritten texts’ (Rags2Riches) as a result of the Open eScience Call 2025. The team involved in this project consists of researchers from various universities: Dr Auke Rijpma, Dr Bas Machielsen, and Dr Bram van Besouw (all Utrecht University), Dr Michail Moatsos (Maastricht University), Dr Ruben Peeters (University of Antwerp), and Dr Amaury de Vicq (University of Groningen); all also happen to be Posthumus alumni and/or fellows.
Rags2Riches will make it possible to analyse handwritten inheritance tax records (the so-called Memories van Successie), at an unprecedented scale. The goal is to cover everyone in the Netherlands who died between roughly the 1880s and the late 1920s, with a clear motivation to extend this to the post-WWII period.
By converting hundreds of thousands of handwritten text into structured, research-ready data that can be searched, linked, and analysed, the project will open up a wide range of use cases. The data can also be linked to other historical sources, enabling work on intergenerational transmission, social mobility, the geography of wealth, and the relationship between wealth and health, including patterns in mortality and cause of death. All tools, models, and workflows will be released as open research software, so they can be reused by researchers and heritage institutions working with digitised historical collections.
The contribution of the netherlands eScience centre consists of up to 4,545 hours of support plus material costs, representing a maximum value of 500,000 euros over the full project duration.
The N.W. Posthumus Institute congratulates the research team for receiving this award!
