Data for History Lectures – Digital History Berlin

4. Dezember 20234. Dezember 2023

Ingo Frank: Ontology Design Patterns for History: Modeling Place-based Information in the Digital Map Lab Holy Roman Empire

This Data for History Lecture is a report on work in progress in the project DigiKAR (Digital Map Lab Holy Roman Empire). The project conducts two case studies in order to explore new approaches of collecting, modeling, and visualization of data about early modern places in the Holy Roman Empire. The Electorate of Mainz case study approaches the complex spatial structure of the Holy Roman Empire using a prosopographical approach to examine the geographical as well as social mobility of different groups (officials, students, etc.) of persons throughout their lives. The Electorate of Saxony case study is dedicated to the collection and integration of place-based historical information and explores new ways of visualizing the different political, legal, economic and social spaces beyond the well-known patchwork maps of the Holy Roman Empire. The talk focuses on data modeling for the second case study.

19. Juni 202322. Juni 2023

Sasha Bruns: The Persistence of Temporality: Tracing Time in Cultural Heritage Knowledge Graphs

Cultural heritage knowledge graphs (KGs) serve as invaluable tools for representing and understanding the meaningful connections among people, artifacts, practices, events, and traditions, shedding light on our shared heritage. By providing a structured semantic representation of cultural heritage data, KGs enhance interoperability, enabling global access and facilitating data reuse. Incorporating temporal context into cultural heritage KGs is crucial for a comprehensive understanding of historical events, their interconnections, and their influence on the present. Moreover, temporal integration allows for innovative exploration of diverse historical sources, objects, and artifacts from various periods, leveraging the power of semantic interlinking. Nevertheless, accurately representing, reasoning over, and querying temporal data in KGs present significant challenges.

9. Januar 202326. Januar 2023

Sofia Baroncini: Artworks interpretations in Linked Open Data: an ongoing project on Panofsky’s iconological studies

Recently, researchers have shown an increased interest in the semantic modeling and description of artworks. Thanks to the thoroughness with which data and their relations can be expressed, the semantic web is an appropriate means to represent the complexity of the art history domain. Currently, several ontologies (e.g. VIR ontology[1], Simulation Ontology[2], vocabularies (Getty Vocabularies[3], Iconclass[4]), and knowledge graphs (e.g. ArtGraph[5], Hyperreal, Wikidata) describing art-related topics are available. Although the presence of such examples, some relevant aspects of the art historical research are poorly represented. Among them, we can cite the iconographical and iconological ones, which focus on artworks’ subjects (i.e. iconographies) and meanings (i.e. symbols, and cultural aspects).

7. November 20227. November 2022

Keynote: Danielle van den Heuvel – The Power of the Anecdotal (Data for History Lecture at the Golden Agents Conference)

On the 9th and 10th of November 2022 the Huygens Institute in collaboration with the City Archives of Amsterdam and the Data for History consortium will organize a conference to present the results of the Golden Agents project and a workshop to discuss shared challenges in extracting data from archival sources, and subsequently processing and modeling data for use in digital humanities and social sciences. A hybrid keynote on Wednesday, 9 November 2022, 3-4 pm, on the topic of “The Power of the Anecdotal” by Dr. Danielle van den Heuvel (Associate Professor at the University of Amsterdam and p.i. of the Freedom of the Streets project) in the context of the Data for History Lectures series concludes the conference.

28. Juni 20228. Juli 2022

Nicola Carboni: A data-driven approach to the study of images circulation

Pictures are the tangible traces of our visual world. They are the materialisation of a classifiable and datable object, a vocabulary of expressions that affect and reflect our history. Pictures are artefacts that bear witness to the act of human production, testifying the choices and qualities of techniques and strategies. They are produced for and within a cultural space and embed traditions, trends, and meanings through their iconographic and aesthetic choices. Pictures reflect their contemporary knowledge dynamics; they express the identity of a social landscape and serve as a communication device.

16. Mai 20229. März 2023

Francesco Beretta: Modelling Social Life: an Extension of CIDOC CRM

According to a standard definition in information technology, an ontology is “a formal specification of a shared conceptualisation of a domain of interest”. The domain of social life is quite relevant not only for historical research but of course more generally for humanities and social sciences. It is therefore evident how interesting it would be to develop a widely used ontology for this domain, with different degrees of abstraction, allowing interoperability of research data in line with the FAIR principles. As a matter of fact we can observe that many projects model and produce data about social roles of persons, memberships in groups, economic and political activity, trends and conflicts in public opinion and societies, etc. The challenge appears then to find a conceptualisation that offers a high-level model of social life allowing for the integration of information in this domain of discourse, with an approach that is sufficiently robust to be accepted and used by specialists from different scientific disciplines.

7. Februar 202211. Mai 2022

Philipp Schneider: Putting visual sources into context: Towards an ontology to analyze medieval heraldic murals and ceiling paintings

The talk will introduce results on the development of an ontology to describe medieval and early modern painted walls and ceilings which used heraldry as a main component of their iconographic program. The purpose of the ontology is to represent the visual structure of such paintings – i.e. how certain coats of arms and other imagery were spatially placed on them – while also modelling their historical context. The overall goal is to enable a data-driven analysis of heraldic murals to better understand the function and usage of this european phenomenon.

10. Januar 202216. Januar 2022

Vincent Ducatteeuw: Developing an urban gazetteer: modelling historical platial information

This talk presents early results on the development of an urban gazetteer useful for Spatial Humanities. The digital gazetteer can store historical place information and is designed with the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM) as the upper-level ontology. In accordance with the FAIR approach, the gazetteer data is available as Linked Open Data and can be queried using (Geo)SPARQL.

22. November 202122. November 2021

Peter Hinkelmanns/Manuel Schwembacher: ONAMA – Annotating Medieval Narratives using Linked Open Data

This talk presents results on developing an Ontology of Narratives of the Middle Ages (ONAMA) on the basis of exemplary text and pictorial sources of the Argonaut Saga. ONAMA enables cross-media research into the narratives and thus allows to overcome disciplinary boundaries between pictorial and textual traditions.

22. Februar 202110. Mai 2021

James Baillie/Tara Andrews/Maxim Romanov/Daniel Knox/Maria Vargha: Modelling Historical Information with Structured Assertion Records

This paper will present an experimental approach to representing historical data in digital format, in particular in situations where there are multiple and contested readings of that information, via use of a five-point ‘pentile’ data model based on historical assertions. „James Baillie/Tara Andrews/Maxim Romanov/Daniel Knox/Maria Vargha: Modelling Historical Information with Structured Assertion Records“ weiterlesen