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Using Linked Data for Prosopographical Research of Historical Persons: Case U.S. Congress Legislators

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Digital Heritage. Progress in Cultural Heritage: Documentation, Preservation, and Protection (EuroMed 2018)

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Abstract

This paper shows how biographical registries can be represented as Linked Data, enriched by data linking to related data sources, and used in Digital Humanities. As a use case, a database of 11 987 historical U.S. Congress Legislators in 1789–2018 was transformed into a knowledge graph. The data was published as a Linked Data service, including a SPARQL endpoint, on top of which tools for biographical and prosopographical research are implemented. A faceted browser named U.S. Congress Prosopographer with visualization tools for knowledge discovery is presented to provide new insights in political history.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://github.com/unitedstates/congress-legislators.

  2. 2.

    http://k7moa.com.

  3. 3.

    The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) ID number.

  4. 4.

    https://www.senate.gov/reference/Years_to_Congress.htm.

  5. 5.

    https://semanticcomputing.github.io/congress-legislators.

  6. 6.

    http://schema.org/docs/schemas.html.

  7. 7.

    http://ldf.fi/congress/.

  8. 8.

    https://www.w3.org/TR/turtle/.

  9. 9.

    http://dbpedia.org.

  10. 10.

    http://ldf.fi.

  11. 11.

    http://ldf.fi/congress/sparql.

  12. 12.

    The idea of facets dates back to the Colon Classification system of S. R. Ranganathan in library science, published in 1933.

  13. 13.

    http://angular-ui.github.io/angular-google-maps/.

  14. 14.

    https://developers.google.com/chart/.

  15. 15.

    Widely known as “The Urban Renewal Projects”.

  16. 16.

    http://angularjs.org.

  17. 17.

    https://github.com/angular-slider/angularjs-slider.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Erkki Heino for implementational help regarding extending the Faceter SPARQL tool for our case studies, to Jouni Tuominen for discussions related to data modeling and Linked Data services, and to Brian Keegan and Thea Lindquist (University of Colorado, Boulder) regarding the U.S. Legislator data and research questions related to it. Goki Miyakita was supported by a mobility scholarship at Aalto University in the frame of the Erasmus Mundus Action 2 Project TEAM, funded by the European Commission. Our research was also supported by the CSC computing services and the Severi project (http://seco.cs.aalto.fi/projects/severi) funded mainly by Business Finland.

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Miyakita, G., Leskinen, P., Hyvönen, E. (2018). Using Linked Data for Prosopographical Research of Historical Persons: Case U.S. Congress Legislators. In: Ioannides, M., et al. Digital Heritage. Progress in Cultural Heritage: Documentation, Preservation, and Protection. EuroMed 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11197. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01765-1_18

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01765-1_18

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