Amsterdam 750

Length 2 min. readtime

Date 17 November 2025

Five centuries of protest on one screen

Amsterdam is a city of protest. From the uprising in 1535 to today’s climate marches, the people of Amsterdam have been making their voices heard for centuries. For the anniversary exhibition Amsterdam in Motion, the Amsterdam Time Machine and TD developed a protest application that brings this outspoken past to life on a large touchscreen within the exhibition.

Visitors can view the images projected onto the multimedia city model and the façade of the Royal Palace on Dam Square directly in the application. There, they can further explore more than five thousand photos and prints related to protest, sourced from the Amsterdam City Archives, the National Archives, and the North Holland Archives. The oldest image is a 1535 engraving; the most recent is a 2015 photograph. Users can filter by type of protest (strike, march, occupation), by theme (such as housing or climate), and by location in the city. This way, they can discover protests in their own neighborhood that they may never have heard of.

Under the hood, the protest application is a concrete implementation of the Amsterdam Time Machine, a research project by the CREATE Lab (University of Amsterdam) working on an open data infrastructure for Amsterdam’s history. Historical data and image collections are linked via Linked Open Data and made accessible to a broad audience through digital interfaces. For Amsterdam in Motion, that infrastructure was translated into a clear, public-friendly interface in which archival data feels like a narrative rather than a database.

TD was responsible for the digital design and interaction of the application. Together with the researchers, the protest thesaurus (21 subcategories) was transformed into intuitive filters, the connection with the city model and the Dam Square façade was designed, and the interface was set up to allow for future expansions such as a timeline or a map display of protest locations. For organizations in heritage, culture, and the public sector, this case demonstrates how to turn complex datasets into an accessible, interactive experience without losing substantive nuance.