89,140 research outputs found

    Maintaining a Linked Data Cloud and Data Service for Second World War History

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    One of the great promises of Linked Data is to provide a shared data infrastructure into which new data can be imported and aligned with, forming a sustainable, ever growing Linked Data Cloud (LDC). This paper studies and evaluates this idea in the context of the WarSampo LDC that provides a data infrastructure for Second World War related ontologies and data in Finland, including several mutually linked graphs, totaling ca 12 million triples. Two data integration case studies are presented, where the original WarSampo LDC and the related semantic portal were first extended by a dataset of hundreds of war cemeteries and thousands of photographs of them, and then by another dataset of over 4450 Finnish prisoners of war. As a conclusion, lessons learned are explicated, based on hands-on experience in maintaining the WarSampo LDC in a production environment.Peer reviewe

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

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    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

    Integrating Historical Person Registers as Linked Open Data in the WarSampo Knowledge Graph

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    Semantic data integration from heterogeneous, distributed data silos enables Digital Humanities research and application development employing a larger, mutually enriched and interlinked knowledge graph. However, data integration is challenging, involving aligning the data models and reconciling the concepts and named entities, such as persons and places. This paper presents a record linkage process to reconcile person references in different military historical person registers with structured metadata. The information about persons is aggregated into a single knowledge graph. The process was applied to reconcile three person registers of the popular semantic portal "WarSampo -- Finnish World War 2 on the Semantic Web". The registers contain detailed information about some 100,000 people and are individually maintained by domain experts. Thus, the integration process needs to be automatic and adaptable to changes in the registers. An evaluation of the record linkage results is promising and provides some insight into military person register reconciliation in general.Peer reviewe

    Evocative computing – creating meaningful lasting experiences in connecting with the past

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    We present an approach – evocative computing – that demonstrates how ‘at hand’ technologies can be ‘picked up’ and used by people to create meaningful and lasting experiences, through connecting and interacting with the past. The approach is instantiated here through a suite of interactive technologies configured for an indoor-outdoor setting that enables groups to explore, discover and research the history and background of a public cemetery. We report on a two-part study where different groups visited the cemetery and interacted with the digital tools and resources. During their activities serendipitous uses of the technology led to connections being made between personal memo-ries and ongoing activities. Furthermore, these experiences were found to be long-lasting; a follow-up study, one year later, showed them to be highly memorable, and in some cases leading participants to take up new directions in their work. We discuss the value of evocative computing for enriching user experiences and engagement with heritage practices

    Putting It into Practice: Using Feminist Fractured Foundationalism in Researching Children in the Concentration Camps of the South African War

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    Feminist fractured foundationalism has been developed over a series of collaborative writings as a combined epistemology and methodology, although it has mainly been discussed in epistemological terms. It was operationalised as a methodology in a joint research project in South Africa concerned with investigating two important ways that the experiences of children in the South African War 1899-1902, in particular in the concentration camps established during its commando and 'scorched earth' phase, were represented contemporaneously: in the official records, and in photography. The details of the research and writing process involved are provided around discussion of the nine strategies that compose feminist fractured foundationalism and its strengths and limitations in methodological terms are reviewed.Feminist Fractured Foundationalism, Feminist Methodology, Feminist Epistemology, Feminist Sociology, South African War 1899-1902, Concentration Camps, Children, Retrievable Documents, Photographs

    Reconciling and Using Historical Person Registers as Linked Open Data in the AcademySampo Portal and Data Service

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    This paper presents a method for extracting and reassembling a genealogical network automatically from a biographical register of historical people. The method is applied to a dataset of short textual biographies about all 28 000 Finnish and Swedish academic people educated in 1640-1899 in Finland. The aim is to connect and disambiguate the relatives mentioned in the biographies in order to build a continuous, genealogical network, which can be used in Digital Humanities for data and network analysis of historical academic people and their lives. An artificial neural network approach is presented for solving a supervised learning task to disambiguate relatives mentioned in the register descriptions using basic biographical information enhanced with an ontology of vocations and additional occasionally sparse genealogical information. Evaluation results of the record linkage are promising and provide novel insights into the problem of historical people register reconciliation. The outcome of the work has been used in practise as part of the in-use AcademySampo portal and linked open data service, a new member in the Sampo series of cultural heritage applications for Digital Humanities.Peer reviewe

    DARIAH and the Benelux

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    Under Construction (Identities, Communities and Visual Overkill)

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    Most of modern identities emerge from mediated interactions in public and virtual spaces. There are no acknowledged authorities to watch over organizational identities and grant them legitimacy. These identities are renegotiated in real and virtual communities, often carry a permanent label 'under construction' and can be violently contested in public space. Garrulous behaviour stimulated by interactive media and by the forthcoming Evernet allows for a gradual build-up of individual and social response to the visual overkill in media-regulated societies. Voicing the images over, we mobilize for action, dismantle institutional structures and generally speaking mix gate-keeping with data-dating, thus contributing to the overall change of world's cultural climate - one of bricks, clicks and flicks. Benetton's Toscani campaign and Napster's ordeal are cases in point.corporate identity;cultural climate;flicks;virtual community;visual overkill
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