Historiography’s Two Voices: Data Infrastructure and History at Scale in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB)

Studies on the Semantic Web

Tuominen

2021

This paper presents a prosopographical knowledge graph describing the Members of Parliament in Finland and related actors in politics, extracted from the databases and textual descriptions of the Parliament of Finland. The data has been interlinked internally and enriched with data linking to external data sources according to the 5-star Linked Data model. The data has been published together with its schema for better re-usability and is validated using ShEx. The knowledge graph presented is integrated with another knowledge graph about over 900 000 parliamentary plenary speeches in Finland (1907–) to form a larger parliamentary LOD publication FinnParla of the Parliament of Finland. The data is being used for Digital Humanities research on parliamentary networks, culture, and language.

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Members of Parliament in Finland Knowledge Graph and Its Linked Open Data Service

Leskinen

Studies on the Semantic Web

Tuominen

2021

“…However, the texts, the language used, and the biographical collection as a whole can also be studied from a different, historiographical perspective as an artifact reflecting its own time, the editorial values and biases in selecting the biographees, the authors' perspectives, and also from a linguistic points of view. Such analyses have been already made for some national dictionaries of biography, e.g., for the ODNB [55] and the Irish Ainm [2].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Analyzing biography collections historiographically as Linked Data: Case National Biography of Finland

Tamper

Leskinen

et al. 2022

Biographical collections are available on the Web for close reading. However, the underlying texts can also be used for data analysis and distant reading, if the documents are available as data. Such data is usable for creating intelligent user interfaces to biographical data, including Digital Humanities tooling for visualizations, data analysis, and knowledge discovery in biographical and prosopographical research. In this paper, we re-use biographical collection data from a historiographical perspective for analyzing the underlying collection. For example: What kind of people have been included in the collection? Does the language used for describing female biographees differ from that for men? As a case study, the Finnish National Biography, available as part of the Linked Open Data service and semantic portal BiographySampo – Finnish Biographies on the Semantic Web is used. The analyses show interesting results related to, e.g., how specific prosopographical groups, such as women or professional groups are represented and portrayed. Various novel statistics and network analyses of the biographees are presented. Our analyses give new insights to the editors of the National Biography as well as to researchers in biography, prosopography, and historiography. The presented approach can be applied also to similar biography collections in other countries.

“…Bibale's focus on collections as opposed to individual manuscripts further skews the data picture. As a result, any analysis of the data has to be interpreted within the context of the collected data, not necessarily as a representation of a universal truth in the real world (Warren, 2018).…”

Section: Conclusion and Lessons Learnedmentioning

confidence: 99%

Harmonizing and publishing heterogeneous premodern manuscript metadata as Linked Open Data

Koho

Burrows

Asso for Info Science & Tech

et al. 2021

Manuscripts are a crucial form of evidence for research into all aspects of premodern European history and culture, and there are numerous databases devoted to describing them in detail. This descriptive information, however, is typically available only in separate data silos based on incompatible data models and user interfaces. As a result, it has been difficult to study manuscripts comprehensively across these various platforms. To address this challenge, a team of manuscript scholars and computer scientists worked to create "Mapping Manuscript Migrations" (MMM), a semantic portal, and a Linked Open Data service. MMM stands as a successful proof of concept for integrating distinct manuscript datasets into a shared platform for research and discovery with the potential for future expansion. This paper will discuss the major products of the MMM project: a unified data model, a repeatable data transformation pipeline, a Linked Open Data knowledge graph, and a Semantic Web portal. It will also examine the crucial importance of an iterative process of multidisciplinary collaboration embedded throughout the project, enabling humanities researchers to shape the development of a digital platform and tools, while also enabling the same researchers to ask more sophisticated and comprehensive research questions of the aggregated data.