RedressHub: Technical Track
RedressHub is a social valorisation project that maps and systematically documents redress initiatives in Belgium – and, in time, across Europe. It seeks to make complex and scattered information about colonial redress initiatives accessible, analysable and publicly visible. It aims to build an open, dynamic knowledge infrastructure through an interactive online interface, which users will be able to explore, query, and understand the evolving field of colonial redress.
To achieve this, RedressHub will be developed through closely interwoven technical and co-creation tracks. On this page, we describe the technical track, for more information on the co-creation track visit the page RedressHub: Co-Creation Track.
From Public Data to Public Infrastructure
The technical track centres on the technological development and implementation of RedressHub. It involves specialised tasks such as system architecture design, data modelling and processing, database development, interface design, performance testing, and data security. Crucially, these technical activities are not developed in isolation: they are shaped and guided by insights and priorities emerging from the participatory processes of the co-creation track. This ensures an iterative development process with continuous feedback loops, aligning technical implementation with the values and needs of those active in the field of redress.
By combining advanced data techniques with human-centred design, RedressHub is developing an AI semi-automated information retrieval system capable of efficiently populating its database, while remaining attuned to the historical, political, and social nuances of redress contexts.
The technical track integrates a range of AI assisted tools and techniques: including web crawling, web scraping, text classification, and named entity recognition (NER); to identify, extract, and structure relevant data. This work is carried out through a close collaboration between Justice Visions at the Human Rights Centre, software engineers at the Centre for Digital Humanities, and the Language and Translation Technology team.
RedressHub will make extensive use of publicly available, third-party data. This includes:
- Textual content from civil society organisations, government portals, parliamentary archives, and news outlets
- Project pages and publications from academic, artistic, and educational initiatives
- Metadata on organisations and events such as conferences, legal cases, restitution efforts, memorial projects, and truth commissions
- Open-access bibliographic and archival references
The data sources are as diverse as the redress landscape itself, ranging from NGO websites and diaspora group communications to digital press archives and institutional repositories. From these, we extract essential information: who is involved, what actions they are taking, where and when these actions occur, and how they relate to broader redress dynamics.
This reused data serves a dual purpose in the RedressHub platform. First, it is used to train and refine Large Language Models (LLMs), enhancing their ability to tag relevant content through techniques like text relevance tagging and NER. This is essential to creating a semi-autmoated information retrieval strategy, that allows to discover and structure information about redress activities on a larger scale and at a faster pace. Second, this data directly feeds into the structured, queryable database that supports RedressHub’s user interface. These structured entries form the building blocks of a discovery tool that allows users to meaningfully explore redress efforts across geographic and temporal contexts.
Importantly, RedressHub does not reproduce or host full third-party content. Instead, it generates a carefully designed metadata schema that captures the key dimensions of redress-related initiatives. This enables users to search, compare, and contextualise information surfacing connections and patterns that may otherwise remain hidden.
What Will Users See?
Each initiative mapped in RedressHub will be represented by a concise summary, key metadata fields – such as actors, geographic scope, timeframes, and type of initiative – and direct links to the original sources. More than just a database, RedressHub is designed to function as a discovery platform and connective hub, linking users not only to initiatives and resources, but also to the organisations behind them.
RedressHub aspires to be a practical tool for those actively engaged in the struggle for redress, while also serving a broader user community. By providing a comprehensive and accessible mapping of colonial redress initiatives, the platform aims to contribute meaningfully to ongoing debates around historical injustice and repair. In doing so, it seeks to facilitates knowledge exchange and fosters new and diverse connections.
RedressHub is currently in its pilot phase in Belgium. If you’re working on redress in the Belgian context – or wish to be involved as the project expands across Europe – we would love to hear from you.
