'The indigenous, I presume?' A Digital Study of Mental Models and Mental Decolonization in the Biographie Coloniale Belge and Biographie Belge d'Outre-Mer

The Biographie Coloniale Belge (BCB; 1948-1958) and Biographie Belge d’Outre-Mer(BBOM; 1968-2015) are the scientific flagships of the Belgian colonial enterprise. The BCB/BBOM isa nine-volume encyclopaedia with biographic sketches of people who contributed to the colonial project.Although the majority of them are ‘westerners’, a few Congolese received a lemma too, and even moreof them played a part in the background of other biographies. This paper analyses the constructed mentalmodels concerning the Congolese population in the BCB/BBOM. How often are Congolese mentioned,how are they portrayed, from which contexts are they absent and how do the ‘westerners’position themselves in relationship to them? To enable a discourse analysis of this scale, we digitisedthe complete BCB/BBOM semi-automatically and made it computationally searchable for future studies