We present the Dutch Ships and Sailors Linked Data Cloud. This heterogeneous dataset brings together four curated datasets on Dutch Maritime history as five-star linked data. The individual datasets use separate datamodels, designed in close collaboration with maritime historical researchers. The individual models are mapped to a common interoperability layer, allowing for analysis of the data on the general level. We present the datasets, modeling decisions, internal links and links to external data sources. We show ways of accessing the data and present a number of examples of how the dataset can be used for historical research. The Dutch Ships and Sailors Linked Data Cloud is a potential hub dataset for digital history research and a prime example of the benefits of Linked Data for this field.
Rising life expectancy has been suggested as one of the determining factors of the start of modern economic growth, On the basis of information relating to elite groups, economic historians have thereby questioned the idea, prevalent among most demographers, that life expectancy was rather stable until around 1800. There still is a scarcity of data on the long-term evolution of life expectancy that can support this claim. We present data on medical professionals in the Netherlands to study the evolution of life expectancy at age 25 in birth cohorts from the sixteenth till the beginning of the twentieth centuries. We compare the medical professions with groups without formal medical knowledge,-clergymen, visual artists, notable Dutch people, and members of the nobility and patriciate-thereby providing clues for the role that medicine has played as a factor behind the mortality decline. We use event history models to estimate the length of life. We observed very strong increases in survival in all selected groups, starting in cohorts born in the seventeenth century. The medical profession was no exception to this trend yet the rise in life expectancy in the profession did not surpass that of other groups. Thus, medical knowledge for a long time seems to have provided only limited advantages to those who possessed it.
The past decades have changed the way we deal with archives and archival materials. Archives digitised their inventories and part of their collections, but they were joined by many other parties who published archival collections and archive-worthy materials on the web. The information world is in continuous flux, and the developments have made clear that archives and libraries have lost much of their position as the vested authorities of information access. They are challenged by technological parties and citizen science that have as yet not established themselves in definitive positions as information brokers. We propose to analyse the field in terms of information authority, a composite of many different aspects that all contribute to its importance, availability and use. In this article, we first explore the issue of (information) authority in the digital realm, and explain why we choose a conflict metaphor to analyse the different types of partners in the information ecosystem. Digital archives call for cooperation and openness as information is ‘everywhere’, but this is hard to realise as it requires translating intentions into technical means. To maintain their position of authority, archives adopt standards and regulations. We argue that openness is the key, but hard to organise with the existing standards because they are used in monolithic ways that make it hard to combine information. Combining asks for methods from established scholarly and archival disciplines as well as from technology. Furthermore, sharing and cooperation require a harmonisation of contexts: the different contexts in which information is created and organised need to be aligned to understand how collections can be combined across different dimensions. This calls for providing (structured) metadata that define the scope of a collection, to allow one to determine whether combining information is useful. At the moment, the state of affairs is in flux and there is no fixed methodology. In the last part, we explore ways to facilitate and evaluate interdisciplinary communication and collaboration on methodology to address the preceding challenges of producing quality, in all realms.
Digitization and digital methods have had a big impact on migration history and history in general. The dispersed and fragmented nature of migration heritage that involves at least two countries and many cultural heritage institutions make it clear that migration history can be much improved by using digital means to connect collections. This makes it possible to overcome the biases that policy have introduced in private and public collections alike by selection and perspective. Digital methods are not immune to these biases and may even introduce new distortions because they often change heritage contextualizations. In this article, Van Faassen and Hoekstra argue that therefore they should be embedded in source criticism methodology. They use the example of post-world War II Dutch-Australian emigration to show how a migrant registration system can be used as a structural device to connect migrant heritage. They use methods from computer vision to assess the information distribution of the registration system. Together, connecting collections and information assessments give an encompassing view of the migrant visibility and invisibility in the heritage collections and perspectives for scholars to become aware of heritage biases.
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