Biography
Gerhard de Kok (1983) is a maritime historian. In 2019 he obtained his PhD from Leiden University after defending a thesis on the local economic effects of the Transatlantic slave trade on the Dutch island of Walcheren (1755-1780). He subsequently worked for various KNAW institutes (KITLV, IISG, Huygens) and Leiden University.
At the Huygens Institute, De Kok is project coordinator for the Netwerk Maritieme Bronnen (Network of Maritime Sources). This will be a Linked Open Data (LOD) research environment where users will be able to explore maritime heritage collections and relevant scientific datasets.
In his research, De Kok utilizes research methods from the Digital Humanities. In 2021, he built a web application that empowers researchers to efficiently search vast amounts of automatically transcribed colonial archives. He also explores machine learning, word embeddings and LOD to enhance historical research.
