Laure Julie Crouzet

Biographie

Laure Julie Crouzet holds a Bachelor’s degree in Art History and History from the Freie Universität Berlin. She studied German colonial history, the history of slavery and slave narratives, postcolonial theory and decolonial practices, Orientalism and critical historiography, provenance research and the theoretical model of the “biography” of objects to contextualise the commodification, mobility, and translocation of  cultural belongings and human remains in collection history and museum acquisition contexts from the early modern period onwards. She is currently involved in a pilot project at the Central Archive of the Berlin State Museums and the Ethnological Museum of Berlin that explores the application of artificial intelligence to colonial provenance research. She contributes to the development and testing of AI-assisted methods for the transcription, translation, and visualisation of provenance data from handwritten primary sources documenting the colonial military campaigns. She begin a Master’s degree in Digital History at Humboldt University in order to develop sustainable, open-source, and ethical IT tools for provenance research that support and facilitate collaboration within the international community. The programme combines traditional historical questions with aspects of computer science and statistics ranging from the digitisation and curation of historical sources, through databases and visualisation, to the Semantic Web, data mining, programming (using Python), and machine learning.