Research group Political Culture and History
Specialisation Maritime History, crowd sourcing, digitization, data curation, entity extraction, Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) and Linked Open Data (LOD)

Biography

Jirsi is a maritime historian specialized in the early modern period. He studied at the universities of Leiden, Greifswald and Amsterdam. After his graduation he started as a historical researcher and writer of modern port company histories in Rotterdam. In 2016 he began working for the Golden Agents project at the Amsterdam City Archives and the Huygens Institute, returning to work with 17th and 18th Century Amsterdam notarial deeds. During this project he delved into the world of digitization, crowd sourcing, data curation, entity extraction, Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) and Linked Open Data (LOD). After the Golden Agents project was ended, he became in 2023 part of the Republic project at the Huygens Institute and he started as project leader of a project about West Indian seafarers at the Amsterdam City Archives. In both projects Jirsi is working again a lot with HTR, entity extraction and LOD principles.