Proposal for a Teach session: Linked Historical Data, Big and Small – use case tbd

Claartje Rasterhoff (UvA) & Auke Rijpma (UU; IISG (CLARIAH)

Just as more and more historians are getting used to working with
Excel or Access, a new type of datamodel is taking over the world:
graph databases. Increasingly, digital history projects use RDF-based
linked data models,and specific languages with which query this data
(such as SPARQL). This is not just the case in the fields of social
and economic history, where data is often structured, but also in
practices of cultural and political historians, who work with, for
example, texts, concepts or artefacts. Moreover, many cultural
institutions such as museums and libraries are making their
collections available in linked open data format (cf. Getty,
Rijksmuseum, Europeana). In this workshop we discuss linked data as a
way to enrich and link existing historical datasets, but also as a
means to represent and store the complex and often heterogeneous data
that is used by historians.

Part 1: Introduction Linked Data. What is this thing called Linked
Data? What do we talk about when we talk about triples, semantic data,
graphs and RDF? And why and how may we use these in historical
research?
Part 2: Querying linked data: use case TBD [suggestions are welcome]. We look at the basic structure of this dataset and experiment with the querying interface and language (SPARQL).

No previous knowledge is required.