data modelling – Digital History Berlin

17. Januar 202217. Januar 2022

Cindarella Petz: Modelling political trials as networks – perks, pitfalls, and possibilities

The following talk focuses on the perks, pitfalls, and possibilities of employing network analysis in a case study* to identify and to evaluate political judiciary during the Dollfuß-Schuschnigg-Regime (1933–38). I propose to model these court trials as networks, which allow to utilize networks as epistemic tools for structural analysis. The case study presented in this talk is based on a dataset of over 1,800 court cases tried at the provincial courts of Vienna in 1935, which was curated in the process of a project on political repression by the University of Vienna (Wenninger/Mesner/Ardelt 2015–17).

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.

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.

29. Juni 202129. Juni 2021

Julia Pabst, Anna Grönig: Report on the conference – “Data for History 2021” – Day 5 (16 June 2021)

Keynote #2

The fifth day of the Data for History conference started with the keynote Social Semantic Annotation: Linking People and Places in the Pelagios Digital Ecosystem by Rebecca Kahn (University of Vienna). This talk was about the experience from the Pelagios project on building a method and a community in and around the use of linked geo-data for working with historical sources. Rebecca Kahn’s talk focused not on the methods of the project, but on the community and network around it.
Pelagios is a Network that connects a method and a community with digital resources. Part of the project consists of providing the Recogito and Peripleo, a search engine for Linked Data.
Pelagios consists of four different founders, an investigative team and many other people involved from different directions (GLAM, students, etc.) The Network was built on the premise of openness regarding data, technology and the community.

16. Juni 202129. Juni 2021

Julia Pabst, Anna Grönig: Report on the conference – “Data for History 2021” – Day 4 (09 June 2021)

Session 8 – Providing Data on Persons

The fourth day of the conference started with the lecture “IPIF – pragmatic modelling decisions”. Contributors were Matthias Schlögl (Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna), Georg Vogeler, Gunter Vasold (University of Graz) and Richard Hadden (Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna). The idea of IPIF is to take a pragmatic approach to modelling based on the factoid model and to provide a RESTful API to query data structured in this way. In the model, the metadata of its creation and modification aggregates information on a person, the source and the statements are extracted from the source by the creator of the factoid. Dating information a lot of the time is not easy in history with time ranges or broad terms in different sources. To model time and dating, the IPIF model uses a simple approach by distinguishing a date as a label and a sort date which allows to keep the original information in textual form, but also to filter it. The whole idea is to simplify the way data is computed. SPARQL is richer, but because of its complexity, you always have to know very specific information about the implementation. IPIF tries to use a less formalized approach to make it more easy to work with different data sources.