Silk Purses and Sow's Ears: Can Structured Data Deal with Historical Sources?

Abstract

A highly structured representation of materials have been largely neglected by historians as a way to explore historical sources in part because the textual nature of the sources often seems to preclude a structured representation. This paper proposes a place for them in the historian's toolkit and explores through a few examples how, as a way to formally express an historical interpretation of a body of material, they provide a mechanism to potentially enrich the exploration and development of an historian's interpretation of that material. Highly structured data exhibits a kind of classical clarity of approach that does not fit well with current postmodern and post-Enlightenment trends in the humanities, and this article touches on these issues, and suggests a few approaches to them.

Exploring a Model for the Semantics of Medieval Legal Charters

“…What is the nature of this difference? Some of it was observed by one of us (Bradley) in a presentation about the place of structured data in history at the University of Lisbon in 2011 and subsequently published in this journal 6 .…”