Encoding Financial Records for Historical Research

The standard guidelines for scholarly markup of digitized sources, those of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), do not provide adequate models for representing the semantic value of financial records. Nevertheless, various digitization projects have used TEI-compliant XML to encode manuscript collections that include financial documentation. And now a handful of projects have begun to use TEI as they turn attention to financial records per se, revealing a need for extended markup guidelines to increase the accessibility of these resources. We will organize a meeting of historians, archivists, and technologists as a first step toward developing standards for markup of transcribed text and the application of metadata that will allow for searching across collections of manuscript financial records. Ultimately, the process begun with this meeting will lead to an extension of current TEI guidelines to include a module on financial records

Wheaton College Digital History Project

Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: This sequence of course activities describes an intensive pedagogical engagement between history faculty members, archives staff, and library IT staff to involve students in historical research using digital tools, with a central focus on the curation of archival source material. Students transcribe and encode materials from the Wheaton College archival collections using TEI and XML, developing what amount to digital documentary editions of documents which are then published online as part of the Wheaton College Digital History Project. This example is part of an evolving series of assignments and student activities that take advantage of a long-term institutional project. The collaborative project design exposes students to a variety of professional roles (including archivists, librarians, and information technology staff) and thus emphasizes the real-world nature of the work. Students understand that they are contributing to a significant public effort that has established practices and visibility and that the project continues to evolve as a result of their work

Modeling semantically Enhanced Digital Edition of Accounts (MEDEA) for Discovery and Comparison on the Semantic Web

Historical accounting documents are a genre of texts that have considerable research potential if we treat them as humanities sources. MEDEA is a cooperative international project whose principal investigators recommend creating digital scholarly editions of accounts as a first step in a process that will open the information contained within them to the affordances of the Semantic Web. MEDEA researchers are at work on a bookkeeping ontology that can be used to intermediate between XML markup and exposing Linked Open Data as RDF. The information contained in the texts of accounts can then be used to explore humanities questions at levels from the granular or local to the regional or global. This paper reflects presentations from a multi-speaker session at DH2016 in which MEDEA participants discussed the kinds of humanities information found in accounts, the forms of electronic representation available for working with them, and an evolving bookkeeping ontology based on CIDOC-CRM

Reframing Digital Humanities: Conversations with Digital Humanists

Defining digital humanities is a unique academic challenge. In this volume, Julian Chambliss, Professor of English at Michigan State University, explores the meaning, practice, and implication of digital humanities by talking to scholars deeply engaged with digital methods and the promise they hold for the humanities

Modeling semantically Enriched Digital Edition of Accounts (MEDEA)

Wheaton College (Massachusetts) and the University of Regensburg will bring together economic historians, scholarly editors, and technical experts to discuss and test emerging methods for semantic markup of account books. This bilateral project focused on Modeling semantically Enriched Digital Edition of Accounts (MEDEA) and includes three stages: At the summer 2015 meeting at the University of Regensburg, Project Directors will present models of semantic markup of accounts for discussion, critique, and suggestions from the invited experts. Subsequently, participants will produce examples as models for further testing and development of broad standards and cost-effective best practices for transcription, markup, and analysis of accounting records. During the March 2016 meeting at Wheaton College, principals will present results of digitization testing and discuss next steps for expanding the communities of practice employing these models in a wide range of historical financial records