Once upon a time….

“Humans, presented with pieces of information about people, put things into the form of a story.” (Edward Ayers)

“even isolated and inert pieces of evidence – a list, a letter, a map, a picture – can assume new and unimagined meanings when placed in juxtaposition with other fragments.” (Edward Ayers)

historywall.nma.gov.au

wraggelabs.com/shed/presentations/anzsi

http://wraggelabs.com/shed/presentations/anzsi/

What we need is a data framework that sits beneath the text, identifying people, dates and places, and defining relationships between them and our documentary sources. A framework that computers could understand and interpret, so that if they saw something they knew was a placename they could head off and look for other people associated with that place. Instead of just presenting our research we’d be creating a whole series of points of connection, discovery and aggregation. (Tim Sherratt)

…this is the goal of Linked Data.

Linking Lives

http://archiveshub.ac.uk/linkinglives/

Aims

A user interface to show the value of Linked Data

Event: Birth of Skinner, Beverley, 1938-1999, artist and Death of Skinner, Beverley, 1938-1999, artist

Type: geo:SpatialThing

Within: http://www.uk-postcodes.com/postcode/SE146NW and http://data.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/id/postcodeunit/SE146NW

Context

• Locah: creating linked data– knowing what we want to say – data modelling– defining relationships– selecting vocabularies – deciding on URIs– creating RDF XML– linking to external resources

Why?

• Telling stories• Giving (more) control to the end-user• Placing archives in a global information space• External data forms part of the user interface

– moving away from the silo approach• Dynamic links to other content• Extensible• An exemplar – shows what can be done

Things to think about

• Usability and clarity• Provenance• Sustainability• ‘Same as’ links• Persistence of links• Retrieval speeds• Data licensing

Biggest challenge…?

Data Quality

Biggest constraint…?

Lack of Linked Data to link to

Biggest worry…?

Persistence

Sharing: for people & machines

• Share vocabularies = I’m talking about the same kind of things as you

• Share identifiers = Yep, I’m talking about the same person, the same place, the same subject as you

• Linked Data = a way to help computers fit the bits together

What happens when institutions and archives are ‘decentred’ in favour of the individual? What changes when we examine the world through the collected fragments of knowledge that we can recover about a single person, reorganised as a biographical narrative, rather than as part of an archival system?

Tim Hitchcock, ‘Digital Searching and the Re-formulation of Historical Knowledge’, in Mark Greengrass and Lorna Hughes (eds), The Virtual Representation of the Past, Ashgate, Farnham, UK, 2008, p. 90.

Jane Stevensonjane.stevenson@manchester.ac.uk

http://archiveshub.ac.uk/linkinglives/

http://data.archiveshub.ac.uk/

http://blogs.ukoln.ac.uk/locah/