What is it about?
A highly structured representation of materials have been largely neglected by historians as a way to explore historical sources in part because the textual nature of the sources often seems to preclude a structured representation. This paper proposes a place for them in the historian's toolkit and explores through a few examples how, as a way to formally express an historical interpretation of a body of material, they provide a mechanism to potentially enrich the exploration and development of an historian's interpretation of that material. Highly structured data exhibits a kind of classical clarity of approach that does not fit well with current postmodern and post-Enlightenment trends in the humanities, and this article touches on these issues, and suggests a few approaches to them.
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This page is a summary of: Silk Purses and Sow's Ears: Can Structured Data Deal with Historical Sources?, International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing, April 2014, Edinburgh University Press,
DOI: 10.3366/ijhac.2014.0117.
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Resources
People of Medieval Scotland
Information about medieval Scottish people, drawn from legal documents created at the time. The largest set of medieval Scottish people available on the web.
Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England
The Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England (PASE) is a database which aims to provide structured information relating to all the recorded inhabitants of England from the late sixth to the late eleventh century. It is based on a systematic examination of the available written sources for the period, including chronicles, saints’ Lives, charters, libri vitae, inscriptions, Domesday Book and coins; and is intended to serve as a research tool suitable for a wide range of users with an interest in this period.
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