Annual conference of the Data for History consortium, an international community aiming to establish a common method for modelling, curating and managing data in historical research. The objective of this year's virtual conference is to gain a better understanding of current ideas and practices in modelling time, space and agents as historical data and to assess the implications of these choices on the process of historical research and analysis. Throughout all of this, the focus is on exchange and building up a community.

Presentation

Annual conference of the Data for History consortium, an international community aiming to establish a common method for modelling, curating and managing data in historical research. 

The effects of the growing integration of digital tools and methods in historical research make the issues of interoperability of data produced in different projects and domains (archives, museums, etc.), and their reuse in the context of open science and FAIR principles (data should be findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable) ever more pressing. In fact, we are at a turning point in historical research: The change from a primarily analogue based to a primarily digital based working context requires a major reconsideration of the very foundations of our field. Historians have to consciously think through how this change affects their practices and determine the means to best form this new, digital working environment to facilitate the ends of historical research. 

This question becomes particularly clear in the context of datafication, the conversion of analogue information into digital data. In this process, fundamental decisions are taken whose outcomes will determine not only the fidelity of the representation of the primary sources but the reusability of that data into the future. Data modelling decisions taken today will deeply shape and affect the kind of research that will or will not be feasible tomorrow. The challenge is, thus, to make modelling choices in such a way that the highest possible degree of data reusability and sustainability can be guaranteed, while respecting the particular source modelled as well as the specific nature of historical data, such as ambiguity, uncertainty, incompleteness, and change over time.

The objective of this year's conference therefore is to gain a better understanding of current ideas and practices in modelling time, space and agents as historical data and to assess the implications of these choices on the process of historical research and analysis. Throughout all of this, the focus is on exchange and building up a community.

Registration

The virtual conference will take place each Wednesday afternoon via Airmeet from 19 May - 30 June 2021 (all times CEST). Registration is free of charge and open to all those interested.

For further information on the program and abstracts, please visit the Data for History 2021 conference website.

Conference Program

19 May 2021

• 14:00 – 14:15:  Torsten Hiltmann (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin): Introduction
• 14:15 – 15:00: Keynote #1 George Bruseker (Takin.solutions, Plovdiv/Athens): The uses and limits of formal ontologies (Cidoc CRM) for history: addressing and going past the 'digital' in digital history

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15:15 – 16:00: Session 1 – Conceptual Models

• François Vignale (Université du Maine), Francesco Beretta (CNRS/Université de Lyon, LARHRA), Vincent Alamercery (ENS de Lyon, LARHRA): The Reading experiences ontology: a Use-case for OntoMe
• Roman Bleier, Florian Zeilinger, Georg Vogeler, Gabriele Haug-Moritz, Eva Ortlieb (University of Graz): Petitioning, meeting, negotiating: towards a conceptual model for communication in early modern parliamentary systems

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16:15 – 17:00: Session 2 – Context and Transparency

• Katrin Moeller (Historisches Datenzentrum Sachsen-Anhalt, Halle), Georg Fertig (Martin Luther Universität Halle-Wittenberg): The challenge of contextualization and data transparency in structured research data!
• Gioele Barabucci (Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim), Fabio Vitali (Università di Bologna): Context is all: Guidelines for context characterization in knowledge modelling and data formats

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17:15 – 18:00: Session 3 – Integration and Interoperability

• Heikki Rantala, Esko Ikkala (Aalto University), Eero Hyvönen (Aalto University/University of Helsinki): Creating the HISTO Ontology of Finnish History Events
• Matthias Schlögl, Matej Durco, Ingo Börner, Peter Andorfer, Klaus Illmayer (Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna): Connecting the dots: the case of Omnipot

26 May 2021

16:15 – 17:00: Session 4 – Modelling the Analysis

• Helen Mair Rawsthorne (LASTIG, Université Gustave Eiffel): Analysing 18th century hydrographic data: a campaign in the Bay of Biscay, 1750-1751
• Dirk Wintergrün, Roberto Lalli (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin): Coding and analysing socio-epistemic networks - an approach to combine modelling and network analysis

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17:15 – 18:00: Session 5 – Dating the Uncertain

• Mateusz Fafinski (Université de Lausanne): Challenges for visualising spatial and chronological distribution of medieval manuscripts: towards new ontologies
• Andreas Kuczera (Academy of Science and Literature, Mainz): Uncertainty as a Challenge - Normalisation of Dates in the Regesta Imperii

2 June 2021

14:00 – 16:00: Poster Session and Poster Slam

Participants:

• Vincent Baillet (Archéovision, CNRS, Université Bordeaux Montaigne): The life cycle of 3D digital data in an archaeological research: case study in Greek archaeology with the lesbic kyma
• Sebastian Bondzio (GHI Washington): Large Card Indexes in Historical Research – Contemplating Historical Big Data
• Frederike Buda, Andreas Birk (Jacobs University): 3D Digitization of the Bunker "Valentin": Methods, Challenges and Possibilities
• Miguel Calleja-Puerta (University of Oviedo): The encoding of agency in Iberian notarial charters (XIIth-XVIIth centuries)
• Natália Da Silva Perez (Centre for Privacy Studies, University of Copenhagen): Modelling Historical Concepts of Privacy: The Challenges of Creating Datasets for Text Mining in Historical Documents
• Ingo Frank (Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies, Regensburg), Monika Barget (Leibniz Institute of European History, Mainz): Ontology-based Modelling of Time, Places, Agents in the Project DigiKAR (Digitale Kartenwerkstatt Altes Reich / Digital Map Lab Holy Roman Empire)
• Julia Jaklin, Elias Berner, Peter Provaznik, Matej Santi (University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna): Telling Sounds: Annotating and Connecting Audio(visual) Sources for Musicological Research
• Christian Knüpfer, Clemens Beck (University of Jena): Modelling prosopographic knowledge from historical events
• Stephan Kurz, Matthias Schlögl (Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna): Modelling the Austro-Hungarian Administration as a Resource
• Nicolas Lasolle (University of Lorraine): Temporal Knowledge Representation and Exploitation for the Henri Poincaré Correspondence Corpus
• Lars Müller, Kilian Schmidtner, Stefan Cramme, Clemens Schulz (Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education, Frankfurt/M.): Modelling Prussian Teachers' Biographical Data
• Cord Pagenstecher (CeDiS, Freie Universität Berlin): Oral history archives: Time, space and agency in research environments for audiovisual research data
• Marie Puren, Pierre Vernus (Laboratoire de recherche historique Rhône-Alpes, Lyon): Better preserving the European Silk Heritage with the SILKNOW ontology. A CRM extension for modelizing the production process of silk artefacts
• Marie Puren, Pierre Vernus (Laboratoire de recherche historique Rhône-Alpes, Lyon): Elaborating and using a CIDOC CRM extension to study and compare Cultural Heritage artefacts produced over several centuries in Europe. A case study on historical silk-related artefacts
• Marie-Odile Rousset (Archéorient, Lyon), Francesco Beretta (Université de Lyon), Vincent Alamercery (Laboratoire de recherche historique Rhône-Alpes, Lyon), Sébastien Durost (Bibracte EPCC), Jean-Pierre Girard (Archéorient, Lyon), François Mistral (Agence Bibliographique de l'Enseignement Supérieur), Miled Rousset (Maison de l'Orient et de la Méditerranée - Jean Pouilloux, Lyon): HisArc-RDF: prototyping an operating chain, related to the Linked Open Data, on structurally and semantically heterogeneous archaeological data sets 
• Matthias Schlögl, Marcella Tambuscio (Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage, Vienna), Maria Mesner (University of Vienna), Matthias Trinkaus (Kreisky Archives, Vienna): Diachronic analysis of co-occurrences networks: a case study on Staribacher diaries and Austrian politics
• Wolfgang Schmidle (German Archaeological Institute, Berlin): ChronOntology, a gazetteer for temporal terms
• Henri Sergent (Centre Maurice Halbwachs, Paris): Modelling Time, Places, Agents for the HyperOtlet research project
• Lixuan Song (Laboratoire de recherche historique Rhône-Alpes, Lyon): Research in History with the method of life science
• Giorgia Tolfo (British Library, London), Timothy Hobson (The Alan Turing Institute, London): Supporting an interdisciplinary research agenda through meta-modelling. The case of Living with machines

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16:15 – 17:00: Session 6 – Uncertain Time and Space

• Pim Van Bree, Geert Kessels (LAB 1100, The Hague): Chronology Statements for nodegoat: a temporal topology to interface with vague, relational, and actionable dates
• Grzegorz Myrda, Tomasz Panecki (Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw): Stable identifiers for historical topographic objects

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17:15 – 18:00: Session 7 – Space and Agents

• Philipp Schneider (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin): Heraldry as a Historical Source to Conceptualize Medieval Spaces and Agents: From Historiographic Concepts to Data Modelling Approaches
• Simon Donig (Universität Passau), Maria Christoforaki, Siegfried Handschuh (University of St. Gallen): Space, time and period - the Neoclassica approach

9 June 2021

16:15 – 17:00: Session 8 – Providing Data on Persons

• Matthias Schlögl (Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna), Georg Vogeler, Gunter Vasold (University of Graz): IPIF - pragmatic modelling decisions
• Bärbel Kröger, Christian Popp (Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities): WIAG - A dataHub for Medieval and Early Modern Research

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17:15 – 18:00: Session 9 – Integrating Data from Sources

• Annemieke Romein (Huygens ING, Amsterdam), Andreas Wagner (Max-Planck-Institute for European Legal History, Frankfurt/M.), Saskia Limbach (Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz), Klaas Van Gelder (Ghent University), Jørgen Mührmann-Lund (Aarhus University), Nicolas Simon (Casa de la Velasquez, Madrid), Margo De Koster (Ghent University, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Vrije Universiteit Brussel): Linked Histories: Police-Ordinances as an Information-Hub for Early Modern History
• David Zbíral (Masaryk University, Brno), Adam Mertel (Center for Advanced Systems Understanding, Görlitz), Robert L. J. Shaw, Tomáš Hampejs (Masaryk University, Brno): An ontology for modelling the social, spatial, and semantic relations in pre-modern written sources: Takeaways from data model development in the Dissident Networks Project (DISSINET)

16 June 2021

14:00 – 14:45: Keynote #2 Rebecca Kahn (University of Vienna): Social Semantic Annotation: Linking People and Places in the Pelagios Digital Ecosystem

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15:00 - 16:00: Building a Common Conceptualization for Research Data in Historical Sciences 

• Francesco Beretta (CNRS/Université de Lyon, LARHRA), Vincent Alamercery (ENS de Lyon, LARHRA): OntoME and the Semantic Data for Humanities and Social Sciences Project

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16:15 – 17:00: Session 10 – CIDOC CRM on the Test Bench

• Raphaëlle Krummeich (IRIHS, Université de Rouen Normandie): Work in progress attempting to apprehend photography in CIDOC CRM modelling: theoretical contribution to modelling traces, information and meaning constructions
• Claus-Michael Schlesinger (Universität Stuttgart): Modelling a local historical social network applying an object-oriented and event-based approach compatible with CIDOC-CRM

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17:15 – 18:00: Session 11 – Modelling Practices

• Ingo Frank (Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies, Regensburg): From Legacy Data to Intertwingled Historical Census and Survey Data: A Case Study in Linked Research Data Modelling between Knowledge Organization and Knowledge Representation
• Christoph Schmidt-Petri, Martin Schäler, Michael Schefczyk, Klemens Böhm, Jens Willkomm (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology): The CHQL Query Language for Conceptual History Using Google Books Ngrams

23 June 2021

14:00 – 16:00: Plenary Meeting: Data for History (only consortium)

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16:15 – 17:00: Session 12 – Data from Annotated Texts

• Cristina Vertan (Universität Hamburg): Representing vague and uncertain historical data on places people and events in historical texts - a case-study of historical texts of Dimitrie Cantemir
• Deborah Leem, Julianne Nyhan, Antonis Bikakis (University College London): Sir Han Sloane's Information Architecture: Lessons Learned From A Data Driven Research

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• 17:15 – 18:00: Keynote #3 Antske Fokkens (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam): Extracting and Representing Time, Places and Agents from Text

30 June 2021

13:15 – 14:30: Session 13 – Integrating Different Medialities

• Faith Lawrence, Jone Garmendia (The National Archive, Kew), Adam Retter (Evolved Binary): Project Omega: Modelling an Archive Catalogue to Support Future History
• Øyvind Eide, Zoe Schubert (University of Cologne): Space, time, and agents in theatre: Digital documentation of the transience of performances through theatrical agents in time and space
• Zakiya Collier (Weeksville Heritage Center, Brooklyn, NY), Sarah Adams (Semantic Lab at Pratt, Pratt Institute School of Information, New York, NY): Jazz History as Linked Data: The Linking Lost Jazz Shrines Project

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14:45 – 16:00: Session 14 – Building and Visualising Semantic Networks 

• Toby Burrows (The University of Western Australia, Perth), Mikko Koho, Jouni Tuominen (Aalto University), Eero Hyvönen (Aalto University/University of Helsinki), Kevin Page (Oxford e-Research Center), David Lewis, Doug Emery, Hanno Wijsman (Institut de recherche et d'histoire des textes, Paris), Lynn Ransom, Emma Thomson (University of Pennsylvania, Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies): Modelling the History of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts for the Mapping Manuscript Migrations Portal
• Pavlos Fafalios, Korina Doerr, Athina Kritsotaki, Kostas Petrakis, Giorgos Samaritakis, Anastasia Axaridou, George Bruseker, Yannis Tzitzikas, Martin Doerr (FORTH-ICS, Heraklion): Challenges and solutions towards creating a semantic network of historical maritime data
• Christopher Pollin (Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities, Vienna): Mapping Semantic Constructs in Historical Domains to Visual Structures as Basis for Resource Discovery Using the Example of Historical Financial Records

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16:15 – 17:45: Conclusion

Panel discussion