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

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

Harmonizing and publishing heterogeneous premodern manuscript metadata as Linked Open Data

Manuscripts are a crucial form of evidence for research into all aspects of premodern European history and culture, and there are numerous databases devoted to describing them in detail. This descriptive information, however, is typically available only in separate data silos based on incompatible data models and user interfaces. As a result, it has been difficult to study manuscripts comprehensively across these various platforms. To address this challenge, a team of manuscript scholars and computer scientists worked to create "Mapping Manuscript Migrations" (MMM), a semantic portal, and a Linked Open Data service. MMM stands as a successful proof of concept for integrating distinct manuscript datasets into a shared platform for research and discovery with the potential for future expansion. This paper will discuss the major products of the MMM project: a unified data model, a repeatable data transformation pipeline, a Linked Open Data knowledge graph, and a Semantic Web portal. It will also examine the crucial importance of an iterative process of multidisciplinary collaboration embedded throughout the project, enabling humanities researchers to shape the development of a digital platform and tools, while also enabling the same researchers to ask more sophisticated and comprehensive research questions of the aggregated data.Peer reviewe

Early-Onset Diabetic E1-DN Mice Develop Albuminuria and Glomerular Injury Typical of Diabetic Nephropathy

The transgenic E1-DN mice express a kinase-negative epidermal growth factor receptor in their pancreatic islets and are diabetic from two weeks of age due to impaired postnatal growth of beta-cell mass. Here, we characterize the development of hyperglycaemia-induced renal injury in the E1-DN mice. Homozygous mice showed increased albumin excretion rate (AER) at the age of 10 weeks; the albuminuria increased over time and correlated with blood glucose. Morphometric analysis of PAS-stained histological sections and electron microscopy images revealed mesangial expansion in homozygous E1-DN mice, and glomerular sclerosis was observed in the most hyperglycaemic mice. The albuminuric homozygous mice developed also other structural changes in the glomeruli, including thickening of the glomerular basement membrane and widening of podocyte foot processes that are typical for diabetic nephropathy. Increased apoptosis of podocytes was identified as one mechanism contributing to glomerular injury. In addition, nephrin expression was reduced in the podocytes of albuminuric homozygous E1-DN mice. Tubular changes included altered epithelial cell morphology and increased proliferation. In conclusion, hyperglycaemic E1-DN mice develop albuminuria and glomerular and tubular injury typical of human diabetic nephropathy and can serve as a new model to study the mechanisms leading to the development of diabetic nephropathy.Peer reviewe

PARSING AND UNDERSTANDING

String grammars have been found in many ways inadequate for parsing inflectional languages with "free " word order. To overcome these problems we have replaced linear string grammars and tree transformations by their multidimensional generalization, graph grammars. In our approach parsing is seen as a transformation between two graph languages, namely the sets of morphological and semantic representations of natural language sentences. An experimental Finnish question-answering system SUVI based on graph grammars has been implemented. In SUVI the role of individual words is active. Each word is associated to a syntactico-senantic constituent type that is represented by a transition network-like graph whose transitions correspond to transformations in the derivation graph. Parsing is performed by interpreting the constituent type graphs corresponding to the words of the current sentence. 1 WHY GRAPH GRAMMARS? In parsing highly inflectional languages with loose syntax by string grammars several problems arise with the formalism: 1) Morphological structures cannot be adequately represented by trees and string grammars. 2) Many relations between words and constituents are difficult to express by trees and string rewrite rules. For example, case, person, and number agreements are widely used. 3) Relatively free word and constituent ordering found in inflectional languages leads to large and complex grammars with string grammars that are based on linear ordering of symbols. 4) Discontinuous constituents occur often in inflectional languages. 5) The levels of morphology, syntax and semantics are quite intermingled in inflectional languages. For example, in Finnish the correlation between morphological and semantic cases is essential. To solve these problems a stronger, multidimensional formalism that can cope with different levels of language seems necessary. I

Introducing the Data Quality Vocabulary (DQV)

The Data Quality Vocabulary (DQV) provides a metadata model for expressing data quality. DQV was developed by the Data on the Web Best Practice (DWBP) Working Group of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) between 2013 and 2017. This paper aims at providing a deeper understanding of DQV. It introduces its key design principles, components, and the main discussion points that have been raised in the process of designing it. The paper compares DQV with previous quality documentation vocabularies and demonstrates the early uptake of DQV by collecting tools, papers, projects that have exploited and extended DQV

Publishing and using cultural heritage linked data on semantic web

San Rafael, CAxiv, 145 p.: fig., index: 23 c

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