Reconstructing the Wereldomroep's Music Programming at DH Benelux 2026

At DH Benelux 2026 in Maastricht (June 2–5), ACHL together with a group of students presented “The playlist pipeline: Reconstructing the historical music programming of the Indonesian programme of Radio Netherlands Wereldomroep.” The work grew out of a tutorial at the University of Amsterdam, and the paper is the result of that collaboration.

The pipeline uses vision-language models to extract music playlists from digitised broadcast logbooks covering 1950 to 1966, then cross-references what it finds against Discogs. The result is a catalogue of more than 71,000 record entries — a scale that makes it possible to ask what the Wereldomroep actually played, rather than what its programming policy said it should.

The abstract is on Zenodo. A data paper describing the dataset’s methodology and composition will follow.