BLOCKADE

Quintus van Galen is a postdoctoral researcher in BLOCKADE based in Amsterdam. He works on the digital infrastructure making the deep collaboration between the different project team possible, while building towards greater understanding of using machine learning (ML) and large language models (LLM’s) responsibly for historical scholarship. As such, the BLOCKADE project itself is his core research object. He is focussed on supporting his fellow team members in all manner of digital pursuits, from doing OCR on challenging documents to classifying images and extracting specific information from primary sources. One particular area of interest is cross-language document discovery, which enables team members to find relevant sources in languages they themselves cannot read, but their team members can. Additionally, he works on models for feature extraction from the project source base as needed.

These tools and methods will be tested in his case study exploring the public discourse and perception surrounding the Berlin blockade of 1948-49 using newspaper articles and parliamentary debates. This case study will focus specifically on the way international solidarity with the population of Berlin was organised, and how the image of Berlin resilience was mobilised by political and non-state actors for their own purposes.

Quintus’ wider research interests revolve around the way societies in the nineteenth and twentieth century have responded to changing (information) technologies. His work draws on a wide range of print culture sources from the Netherlands, Belgium and the British Commonwealth, often synergising between colonial and metropole discourses.

He studied history in Leuven, Belgium with a focus on imperial and colonial history, before completing a MSc in Digital Humanities at the same. In 2020 he defended his PhD at Edge Hill University (Ormskirk, UK), in which he explored popular imperialism in Victorian newspapers through digital lenses. Before joining BLOCKADE, he lectured history at the University of Amsterdam.