OCT 2023 — PRESENT · APELDOORN, NL · HYBRID
Co‑Founder — TextPast
Building tools that turn historical archives into searchable, verifiable knowledge for cultural‑heritage institutions and private collections. textpast.com
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Senior · Machinarius · Data
Simon C.
Kemper
Data engineer turning archives into knowledge a machine can answer for.
Senior Data Engineer, Nationaal Archief
Co‑Founder, TextPast
Full-Stack Developer
In an age of generative AI
“If everything looks real,
what really is?”
When a model can fabricate any portrait, any document, any voice, resemblance stops being evidence. What still separates a record from an invention is provenance — and provenance is an engineering problem. Every clip on this page was generated from a historical source; the discipline is in being able to trace it back.
Background · a 17th‑century maritime painting, animated by AI
We get lost in hallucinations… see the Portfolio & Writings to find a trail back to true sources of provenance.
I. About
Simon co‑founded TextPast to build RootReal — archival AI whose first promise is provenance.
RootReal answers questions about the past by reasoning over inventories, indices, and transcriptions — enriched through ontologies and linked to relevant external sources. A custom context‑augmentation pipeline grounds every answer in verified archival data, so each statement can be traced back to the record it came from.
It is informed by two decades of hands‑on archival practice — from handwritten‑text recognition and georeferencing to Linked Open Data — across roles in data engineering, digitization, and research.
See how it works in the RootReal presentation, Providing Provenance →
II. Top Skills
01
Context Engineering
02
Data Engineering
03
Full‑stack Development
04
GitOps
05
Machine Learning
06
Application Development
07
Digital Anthropology
08
Archival Science
III. The Record
2014 – present
AUG 2021 — PRESENT · FULL‑TIME
Senior Data Engineer — Nationaal Archief
Developed a natural‑language application that generates Linked Open Data from the Archives' inventories, indices, transcriptions, and external sources. A bespoke Rust pipeline feeds verified source data to a large language model, which answers user questions by pointing directly at the underlying records.
FEB 2021 — AUG 2021
Scientific Researcher — Koninklijke Bibliotheek
Initiated research into a machine‑learning Named‑Entity application for the digitized Indies / Indonesian newspaper collections on Delpher (National Library of the Netherlands) and Opac (National Library of the Republic of Indonesia).
FEB 2020 — AUG 2021
Project Leader — Arsari Group
Researched Margono Djojohadikusumo (1894–1978) — founder of the Indonesian National Bank and a leading indigenous expert at the colonial Office of Co‑operatives. The biography draws on long‑term analysis of the Javanese aristocracy's socio‑economic position via handwritten‑text recognition of VOC, colonial, and Republican archives.
JUL 2019 — JUL 2020
Project Leader — The British Library
Led the digitization of over 21,000 pages of Javanese manuscripts from private collections in Central and East Java. Handwritten‑text recognition and probabilistic indexing produced the first‑ever text‑recognition model of Javanese script. eap.bl.uk
FEB 2019 — DEC 2019
Project Leader — Nikon Corporation
Led the digitization, data‑mining, and cataloguing of the Kartini Collection — the most extensive private map and print collection in Indonesia.
NOV 2018 — APR 2019
Photogrammetrist — DE REE Archiefsystemen
Applied photogrammetry and photography to digitize and catalogue objects in the museum of the Hadiningrat court of Yogyakarta. kratonjogja.id
MAR 2018 — MAR 2019
Project Leader — Delft University Library
Led the digitization of over 30,000 pages of colonial notary records from Javanese towns — long thought lost, traced by the team in private collections. Data‑mining revealed unique insights into the early‑twentieth‑century colonial real‑estate market. colonialarchitecture.eu
JUN 2016 — DEC 2017 · YOGYAKARTA
Digital Archivist — Atlas of Mutual Heritage
Analysed and georeferenced thousands of Dutch colonial maps and prints from the Rijksmuseum, the National Archives in The Hague, and affiliated institutions. atlasofmutualheritage.nl
JUN 2014 — DEC 2015 · ARSIP NASIONAL RI
Digital Archivist — Corts Foundation
Built the database of diplomatic letters found in the daily records of the Dutch East Indies archives.
FEB 2012 — MAY 2014
Research Master Student — Leiden University
IV. Education
2014–23
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) — to be continued
A thesis on the architecture of RootReal — how archival sources are modelled, enriched, and made answerable with provenance intact. One subchapter applies the architecture in practice: multimodal data analysis and mapping — including campaign mapping — across centuries of sources, from fifteenth‑century Samarkand to late colonial surveys, using Handwritten Text Recognition, Named‑Entity processing, and GIS to project them onto georectified early‑modern maps. The work is being continued at a more technical university; an update is forthcoming.
Digital Archiving · Data Mining · GIS · Machine Learning
2012–14
Master of Arts (MA) — Leiden University
Graduated Cum Laude. Data Analytics · Analytical Skills
2008–11
Bachelor's — Utrecht University
Methodology & Statistics, with a track in history. Graduated Cum Laude.
V. Skills & Languages
Tools & Technologies
Rust
Python
JavaScript
SPARQL
XML
Linked Open Data
Full‑stack Development
Systems Engineering
GIS
Metadata
AI & Data Science
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Data Science
Data Mining
Data Analytics
Named‑Entity Processing
Handwriting Recognition
OCR
Statistical Data Analysis
Archives & Research
Digital Archiving
Digitization
Digital Libraries
Archives Management
History
Research
Analytical Skills
Public Speaking
Teaching
Editing
Languages
DutchNATIVE
EnglishFLUENT
Bahasa IndonesiaPROFESSIONAL
JavaneseREADING
Portfolio & Writings
Provenance, Engineered
Selected work in archival data engineering — systems that turn four centuries of inventories, transcriptions, and maps into knowledge a machine can answer for, without ever losing the trail back to the source.
Selected Work
01
2021 – present
RootReal — the Context‑Augmentation Pipeline
TextPast
A bespoke Rust pipeline that grounds every language‑model answer in verified archival data — reasoning over inventories, indices, and transcriptions, enriched through ontologies and linked sources. Each statement it produces can be traced directly back to the record it came from. Provenance is not a feature bolted on at the end; it is the architecture.
Rust
LLM Grounding
Context Engineering
Provenance
See “Providing Provenance” →
[ architecture diagram
— source → pipeline → grounded answer ]
— source → pipeline → grounded answer ]
02
2021 – present
Archival Assistent (Aa)
TextPast
A natural-language assistant that automates the creation of archival aids and answers visitors' questions about the collection — reasoning over inventories, indices, and transcriptions as Linked Open Data, with every answer pointing back to the record it came from.
Archival Aids
Natural-Language Q&A
Linked Open Data
03
2019 – 2020
The First Text‑Recognition Model of Javanese Script
The British Library · EAP1268
Led the digitization of 21,000+ pages of Javanese manuscripts from private collections in Central and East Java. Handwritten‑text recognition and probabilistic indexing produced the first‑ever HTR model of Javanese script.
HTR
Probabilistic Indexing
21,000 pages
eap.bl.uk →
04
2018 – 2019
Colonial Notary Records, Recovered
Delft University Library
Led the digitization of 30,000+ pages of colonial notary records from Javanese towns — long thought lost, traced by the team in private collections. Data‑mining revealed unique insight into the early‑twentieth‑century colonial real‑estate market.
Digitization
Data Mining
30,000 pages
colonialarchitecture.eu →
05
2016 – 2017
Georeferencing the Atlas of Mutual Heritage
Atlas of Mutual Heritage · Yogyakarta
Analysed and georeferenced thousands of Dutch colonial maps and prints from the Rijksmuseum, the National Archives in The Hague, and affiliated institutions — projecting historical cartography onto modern coordinates.
GIS
Georeferencing
Cartography
atlasofmutualheritage.nl →
Writings & Talks
Presentation
Providing Provenance — the RootReal architecture
How archival sources are modelled, enriched, and made answerable by a language model without losing the trail back to the record.
Read →
Thesis
Modelling the Archive (in progress)
A doctoral study of multimodal data analysis and mapping across centuries of sources — HTR, Named‑Entity processing, and GIS projected onto georectified early‑modern maps.
Forthcoming
Method
Animating the Source, Keeping the Trail
Notes on the gallery above: generating motion from a documented original, and why the provenance record — not the result — is the deliverable.
Notes