Minutes of Multilateralism Workshop

INNER_LEAGUE participates in this workshop in Geneva, alongside our close collaborators at the Graduate Institute of Geneva. The workshop is partly open to the public and partly by invitation only.

The “Minutes of Multilateralism” is an innovative digital humanities project designed to create an online platform where researchers, practitioners and the general public will engage with the minutes of the Geneva-based international organisations. By aggregating, interlinking and enriching data, the platform will foster research and provide insights into the role of International Geneva as a multilateral ecosystem. The “Minutes of Multilateralism” is an extension of a pilot project that will be launched early 2026, which will include the minutes of the Assembly of the League of Nations (1920-1939) and the General Assembly of the United Nations (1945-today).

The project will rely on a combination of: a) official minutes that are already digitised and made available online by international organisations; and b) public records that will be digitised by the CDHM (where the associated source PDFs are housed on their original organisation-specific platforms).

The latest Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software will be used on the existing PDF to extract the text and convert it into machine-readable data. This will allow the platform’s users to read, visualise and analyse a vast body of data, covering all the International Geneva fields of activities. The minutes will be enriched with additional information, such as biographical information about the speakers, delegates and representatives.

The platform will enable myriad research methodologies, such as prosopographical research, and will show how international issues were discussed in different settings, uncovering little-known connections among the different stakeholders. The Minutes of Multilateralism platform will, at the same time, increase the visibility of Geneva-based international organisations’ archives, facilitate research and stimulate innovative academic inquiry.