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.
This paper looks at the history of the archive profession and emphasises the perceived role of the archivist as the keeper of truth. It focuses on the recent developments in archival practice with the adoption of post-modern thinking and its implementation with open-access archives online. Following a discussion of that approach, it introduces the concept of creative archiving as an alternative approach to archival practice and continues with the presentation of a case study from the John Latham Archive. It concludes with a discussion of the main pros and cons of creative archiving.
We present a method of setting up a website using the Drupal CMS in order to publish CRM data. Our setup requires basic technical expertise by researchers who are then able to publish their records in both a human accessible way through HTML and a machine friendly format through RDFa. We begin by examining previous work on Drupal and the CRM and identifying useful patterns. We present the Drupal modules that are required by our setup and we explain why these are sustainable. We continue by giving guidelines for setting up Drupal to serve CRM data easily and we describe a specific installation for our case study which is related to decorated papers alongside our CRM mapping. We finish with highlighting the benefits of our method (i.e. speed and user-friendliness) and we refer to a number of issues which require further work (i.e. automatic validation, UI improvements and the provision for SPARQL endpoints).
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