data for History – 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.

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.

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.

2. September 20212. September 2021

Jascha Schmitz: Report on the conference – “Data for History 2021” – Day 7 (30 June 2021)

Panel Discussion

The last session of the Data for History Conference 2021 was a panel discussion between Ariana Ciula (King’s College London), Francesca Tomasi (University of Bologna), Harald Sack (Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructure Karlsruhe) and Francesco Beretta (University of Lyon) on ‘Historical data and interoperability / Quo vadis interoperability’. The opening speech was held by one of the conference’s co-hosts, Torsten Hiltmann (Humboldt University of Berlin), who also took on the role of moderator for the following discussion.

4. August 20214. August 2021

Jascha Schmitz, Anna Grönig: Report on the conference – “Data for History 2021” – Day 7 (30 June 2021)

Session 13 – Integrating Different Medialities

Øyvind Eide and Zoe Schubert (University of Cologne) opened with a presentation on their project Kompakkt, entitled “Space, time, and agents in theatre: Digital documentation of the transience of performances through theatrical agents in time and space”.
First, Øyvind Eide introduced the main features of the meaning of space in theatre: While in the text spatiality is represented by linguistic expressions, in performance both the existing spatiality of the stage (and beyond) and linguistic expressions represent space. Hence, concerning theatre, different forms of documentation are necessary for both categories. Many decisions have to be made and ways found to encircle the non-existent centre of documentation, the performance itself, in order to make it part of a (theatre) collection.
Secondary objects and materials are used for this, such as notes, drawings, audio and video recordings. Digital methods now offer the possibility to make these objects/artifacts more available, describable and linkable.
To this end, they have developed Kompakkt, an online repository where artifacts used in performances are digitally available and explorable. For this purpose, they used a selection of artifacts from the theatre collection of the University of Cologne.

12. Juli 202112. Juli 2021

Julia Pabst, Anna Grönig: Report on the conference – “Data for History 2021” – Day 6 (23 June 2021)

Session 12 – Data from Annotated Texts

The sixth day of the Data for History conference started with Cristina Vertan’s (University of Hamburg) presentation “Representing vague and uncertain historical data on places people and events in historical texts – a case-study of historical texts of Dimitrie Cantemir”. The main focus was on the texts and translations of the universal researcher Dimitrie Cantemir, who was the only one to write a history on the Balkan region from a western perspective. The original work was written in Latin and translated into other languages only in the 18th century. Since there was no word for word translation, the project is now dedicated to such translations. It combines hermeneutic methods with the methods of computer science. There are three directions of investigation: reliability, consistency and vagueness. First, a model with a knowledge base was developed, which also takes into account vague or uncertain places and persons. After that, the detection was done, e.g. to annotate linguistic marks for uncertain places in each of the available languages, followed by the visualization. One of the central points of the modeling was the creation of an ontology. With this ontology, one can now answer queries about the translations and texts, while taking ambiguities into account. The presentation highlighted the complexity of working with texts and translations.