Digital archaeology of shell companies. Infrastructures of global connections and local networks

Shell companies have played a crucial role in the infrastructure of global capitalism as vehicles for tax engineering and maintaining secrecy. The challenge of finding suitable sources for a subject tied to secrecy, and a tendency to focus on national case studies for a phenomenon that transcends geographical boundaries, have hindered efforts to unravel these complex infrastructures. Building on a research initiative that focused exclusively on Luxembourg this newly proposed project adopts a global perspective. It seeks to illuminate the role of legal service providers, by adding three national case studies (Panama, the British Virgin Islands, and Singapore) and focusing on international arenas of legal coding of capital thanks to the company registers, a resource publicly accessible. While this corpus will be enriched with various other sources, the vast amount of unstructured data from the company registers presents a challenge of access and analysis.To make this corpus amenable for distant reading, the raw data must be structured and made accessible through processing and expansion/enrichment. Once the structured data is available, we can use data analysis methods and visualization. The emerging use of large language models based on generative AI shows strong potential to significantly change the way historians will work with large-scale source collections in the future. DIGSHELL aims to be groundbreaking on two fronts. It will provide a comprehensive history of global tax networks, unveiling the development of multi-jurisdictional spaces where national states, global companies, local financial intermediaries, and international organizations collaborate to build, sustain, and govern global financial infrastructures. It addresses the new challenges and opportunities arising in the field of Digital Humanities through the systematic integration of AI, which not only necessitates rethinking data processing but also questions the hermeneutics of digital history.