From Scholar to System to Scale

Generating Meso-level Historical Data to Recover the Lived Experiences of Enslaved People

Sharon M. Leon | History & DH | MSU

@sharonmleon

Index

http://jesuitplantationproject.org/

Patrick Barnes

• Blacksmith.
• Puts his family's freedom in motion in 1792.
• Begins paying on his wife Mary and children Isaac & Hannah in 1793.
• Purchases his own freedom in 1797.

Document Transcriptions

[1802 Dr St. Thomas's Manor in acct with Cash]
[1803]
[Jan]
26     To cash from Henny for 3 barrels corn @ $2   6.00  2.5.0
April 22    To Cash recd for sale of negro Constant, property of N.L. Sewall's estate  101.10.0

[opposite folio 1802 Contra Cr.]
[1803]
[Jan]
10    By do to do (the Taylor C. Layman) for making a servant's great coat  0.12.6
April 22  By Do [cash] to Mrs. Dorothy Digges for negro woman Jenny & her child  85.0.0

Rectangular Research Data

• Enslaved owned by Jesuits: 1144

• Enslaved owned by others: 49

• Free Black people: 36

• Jesuits: 63

• White lay people: 115

People

Event Types

• freedom petition
• estate transfer
• travel
• provisions
• health
• transaction
• labor
• hire
• mention
• punishment
• run away

http://omeka.org/

〞

Critical archival studies broadens the field’s scope beyond an inward, practice-centered orientation and builds a critical stance regarding the role of archives in the production of knowledge and different types of narratives, as well as identity construction.

– Caswell, Punzalan, & Sangwand

• Not transcription
• Not collections finding aid
• Not object metadata
• Derived
• Interpretive
• Often related to entities outside the purview of cultural heritage collections

Meso-Level data

Data modeling

Subject - Object - Predicate

URI-Property-URI

Patrick Barnes

Rel:SpouseOf

Mary Barnes

A Semantic Web...

5 Star Linked Open Data

LOD Vocabulary

Data Types

osrdf:per.000106 a "person";
  oscys:fullName "Thomas, John, III";
  oscys:fullname "Thomas, John, III";
  oscys:juryPoolOf osrdf:per.000057,
    osrdf:per.000056,
    osrdf:per.000058;
  oscys:sex "male";
  oscys:witnessAgainst osrdf:per.000166,
    osrdf:per.000151,
    osrdf:per.000150,
    osrdf:per.000152;
  oscys:witnessFor osrdf:per.000165,
    osrdf:per.000153,

No one wants to write their own linked data....

even if it's in a simple form like Turtle.

Resource Templates

http://onthesegrounds.org/

OTG Model Testing Process

Model Evaluation

Adapted from Flanders and Jannadis's The Shapes of Data in Digital Humanities (2018).

• How does the model fit the user requirements of archivists and historians to understand the lived experiences of enslavement in relation to higher education?
• Does the model fully describe the scope of events in this context?
• How well can the model be supported with existing software using best practices for the publication of LOD?
• What are the costs of its application, in training, documentation, tool development, and maintenance for archives?
• How is it situated in relation to other data models? Does it make use of ontology design patterns and appropriate elements of widely used ontologies?
• Does it make use of existing standards whenever possible, or does it duplicate those standards?

OTG Event Ontology (0.9)

• Hampden-Sydney College
• The Rutgers University of New Jersey
• The University of Georgia
• The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• Washington and Lee University

Testing Partners