Netherlands eScience Center grant for Rags2Riches’ new datasets

A multi-university project, Rags2Riches, received a €500,000 grant from the Netherlands eScience Center for the devolopment of open tools that make it possible to use handwritten inheritance tax records on a larger scale. Amaury de Vicq, Assistant Professor at the University of Groningen, will co-lead Rags2Riches. Dr. Auke Rijpma (Utrecht University) serves as Principal Investigator and the team further includes Dr. Bas Machielsen (Utrecht University), Dr. Michalis Moatsos (Maastricht University), Dr. Ruben Peeters (University of Antwerp), and Dr. Bram van Besouw (Utrecht University) as co-applicants.

Support and Open Science

The project received a substantial in-kind contribution from the Netherlands eScience Center. In total, the eScience Centre allocates up to 4,545 hours of support and coverage of material costs, representing support with a maximum value of €500,000 over the full project duration. All tools, models, and workflows will be released as open research software, enabling reuse by researchers and heritage institutions working with digitalized historical collections.

Vision and ambition

De Vicq is very excited about the project:” Rags2Riches will make it possible to analyse handwritten inheritance tax records (the so-called Memories van Successie), at an unprecedented scale. Our ambition 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 analyzed, we open up a wide range of use cases. Think of large-scale research on wealth inequality and wealth composition (real estate, business assets, domestic and foreign securities, cash, debts) on the individual level, as well as portfolio choice and risk-taking around major shocks such as crises, war, and policy changes. 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. And these are only a few examples. We are very grateful to Open eScience and the external reviewers for sharing that view and for their support!”

For more information, please contact Amaury De Vicq de Cumptich.