Building a Linked Open Data Portal of War Victims in Finland 1914-1922

Peer reviewe

Linked Open Data Service about Historical Finnish Academic People in 1640–1899

Peer reviewe

Communication now and then : analyzing the Republic of Letters as a communication network

Huge advances in understanding patterns of human communication, and the underlying social networks where it takes place, have been made recently using massive automatically recorded data sets from digital communication, such as emails and phone calls. However, it is not clear to what extent these results on human behaviour are artefacts of contemporary communication technology and culture and if the fundamental patterns in communication have changed over history. This paper presents an analysis of historical epistolary metadata with the aim of comparing the underlying historical communication patterns with those of contemporary communication. Our work uses a new epistolary dataset containing metadata on over 150,000 letters sent between the 16th and 19th centuries. The analyses indicate striking resemblances between contemporary and epistolary communication network patterns, including dyadic interactions and ego-level behaviour. Certain aspects of the letter datasets are insufficient to corroborate other similarities or differences for these communication networks. Despite these drawbacks, our work helps confirm that several features of human communication are not artefacts of contemporary mediums or culture, but are likely elements of human behaviour.Peer reviewe

Sammon taontaa semanttisessa webissä (Forging Sampos on the Semantic Web)

Non peer reviewe

WarVictimSampo 1914–1922: a National War Memorial on the Semantic Web for Digital Humanities Research and Applications

AcceptedThis article presents the semantic portal and Linked Open Data service WARVICTIMSAMPO 1914-1922 about the war victims, battles, and prisoner camps in the Finnish Civil and other wars in 1914-1922. The system is based on a database of the National Archives of Finland and additional related data created, compiled, and linked during the project. The system contains detailed information about some 40,000 deaths extracted from several data sources and data about over 1,000 battles of the Civil War. A key novelty of WARVICTIMSAMPO 1914-1922 is the integration of ready-to-use Digital Humanities visualizations and data analysis tooling with semantic faceted search and data exploration, which allows, e.g., studying data about wider prosopographical groups in addition to individual war victims. The article focuses on demonstrating how the tools of the portal, as well as the underlying SPARQL endpoint openly available on the Web, can be used to explore and analyze war history in flexible and visual ways. WARVICTIMSAMPO 1914-1922 is a new member in the series of "Sampo" model-based semantic portals. The portal is in use and has had 23,000 users, including both war historians and the general public seeking information about their deceased relatives.Peer reviewe

Datos, patrones y narrativas: nuevas perspectivas sobre la Guerra Civil y la represión franquista a partir de la visualización de datos abiertos

[spa] En los últimos años ha tenido lugar un incremento sustancial de bases de datos y portales en los que consultar información sobre la Guerra Civil Española y la represión franquista. Estos recursos son útiles para encontrar información sobre perso- nas específicas, pero hasta ahora sus usos por parte de investigaciones centradas en dinámicas históricas de mayor escala ha sido escaso. Este artículo presenta nuevas aproximaciones a la información contenida en estas nuevas bases de datos a partir de las Humanidades Digitales. Se analizan los desafíos presentados por portales de consulta en relación a las prácticas científicas actuales y, en especial, en relación a la adopción de políticas Open Data. En segundo lugar se plantea cómo el uso de metodologías cuantitativas de análisis proporciona nuevas perspectivas a la disciplina histórica. Este planteamiento se ejemplifica a partir de dos casos de estudio al que se han aplicado herramientas digitales distintas: a) la distribución espacial de fosas comunes mediante Sistemas de Información Geográfica y b) la magnitud de la represión franquista en Catalunya a partir de la visualización de datos.[eng] Recent years have seen a substantial increase on the number of databases and web portals providing access to historical records related to the Spanish Civil War and Francoist repression. These resources are useful to find information about specific individuals, but they have been seldom used to explore large-scale historical dynamics. This work presents new Digital Humanities-based approaches to these newly accessible historical resources. We identify the challenges posed by the use of these web portals within the context of current scientific data practices and particularly the adoption of Open Data policies. Second, the paper explores how these resources facilitate the use of quantitative analytical methods able to create new perspectives for historical research. These new perspectives are exemplified through two case studies where different computational tools were applied: a) Geographical Information Systems to identify the spatial distributions of mass graves and b) data visualization to explore the scale of Francoist repression in Catalonia

Datos, patrones y narrativas: nuevas perspectivas sobre la Guerra Civll y la represión frnaquista a partir de la visualización de datos abiertos

En los últimos años ha tenido lugar un incremento sustancial de bases de datos y portales en los que consultar información sobre la Guerra Civil Española y la represión franquista. Estos recursos son útiles para encontrar información sobre personas específicas, pero hasta ahora sus usos por parte de investigaciones centradas en dinámicas históricas de mayor escala ha sido escaso. Este artículo presenta nuevas aproximaciones a la información contenida en estas nuevas bases de datos a partir de las Humanidades Digitales. Se analizan los desafíos presentados por portales de consulta en relación a las prácticas científicas actuales y, en especial, en relación a la adopción de políticas Open Data. En segundo lugar se plantea cómo el uso de metodologías cuantitativas de análisis proporciona nuevas perspectivas a la disciplina histórica. Este planteamiento se ejemplifica a partir de dos casos de estudio al que se han aplicado herramientas digitales distintas: a) la distribución espacial de fosas comunes mediante Sistemas de Información Geográfica y b) la magnitud de la represión franquista en Catalunya a partir de la visualización de datos

Analyzing biography collections historiographically as Linked Data : Case National Biography of Finland

Biographical collections are available on the Web for close reading. However, the underlying texts can also be used for data analysis and distant reading, if the documents are available as data. Such data is usable for creating intelligent user interfaces to biographical data, including Digital Humanities tooling for visualizations, data analysis, and knowledge discovery in biographical and prosopographical research. In this paper, we re-use biographical collection data from a historiographical perspective for analyzing the underlying collection. For example: What kind of people have been included in the collection? Does the language used for describing female biographees differ from that for men? As a case study, the Finnish National Biography, available as part of the Linked Open Data service and semantic portal BiographySampo - Finnish Biographies on the Semantic Web is used. The analyses show interesting results related to, e.g., how specific prosopographical groups, such as women or professional groups are represented and portrayed. Various novel statistics and network analyses of the biographees are presented. Our analyses give new insights to the editors of the National Biography as well as to researchers in biography, prosopography, and historiography. The presented approach can be applied also to similar biography collections in other countries.Peer reviewe

“Sampo” Model and Semantic Portals for Digital Humanities on the Semantic Web

This paper presents the vision and longstanding work in Finland on creating a national Cultural Heritage ontology infrastructure and semantic portals based on Linked Data on the Semantic Web. In particular, the “Sampo” series of semantic portals is considered, including CultureSampo (2009), TravelSampo (2011), BookSampo (2011), WarSampo (2015), BiographySampo (2018), NameSampo (2019), WarWictimSampo (2019), FindSampo (2019), MMM (2020), LawSampo (2020), AcademySampo (2020), and ParliamentSampo (2022). They all share the “Sampo model” for publishing Cultural Heritage content the Semantic Web that typically involves three components: 1) A “business model” for harmonizing, aggregating, and publishing heterogeneous, distributed contents based ona shared ontology infrastructure. 2) An approach to interface design, where the data can be re-used and accessed independently from multiple application perspectives, while the data resides in a single SPARQL endpoint. 3) A two-step model for accessing and analyzing the data where the focus of interest is first filtered out using faceted semantic search, and then visualized or analyzed by ready-to-use Digital Humanities tools of the portal. This model has been proven useful in practise: Sampo portals have attracted lots users from tens of thousands to millions depending on the Sampo. It is argued that the next step ahead could be portals for serendipitous knowledge discovery where the tools, based on AI techniques, are able to find automatically serendipitous, “interesting” phenomena and research questions in the data, and even solve problems with explanations.Peer reviewe

When linguistics meets web technologies. Recent advances in modelling linguistic linked data

This article provides an up-to-date and comprehensive survey of models (including vocabularies, taxonomies and ontologies) used for representing linguistic linked data (LLD). It focuses on the latest developments in the area and both builds upon and complements previous works covering similar territory. The article begins with an overview of recent trends which have had an impact on linked data models and vocabularies, such as the growing influence of the FAIR guidelines, the funding of several major projects in which LLD is a key component, and the increasing importance of the relationship of the digital humanities with LLD. Next, we give an overview of some of the most well known vocabularies and models in LLD. After this we look at some of the latest developments in community standards and initiatives such as OntoLex-Lemon as well as recent work which has been in carried out in corpora and annotation and LLD including a discussion of the LLD metadata vocabularies META-SHARE and lime and language identifiers. In the following part of the paper we look at work which has been realised in a number of recent projects and which has a significant impact on LLD vocabularies and models