Bringing Lives to Light: Biography in Context

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Bringing Lives to LightBiography in Context

• Ray R. Larson, Michael Buckland, Fred Gey
• Ryan Shaw, Jeanette Zerneke, Kim Carl,
• Josh Blumenstock

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The Metadata projects

• Our work is based on four ideas
• Understanding means knowing the context
• Could the use of digital resources be made more
  like using a well-organized library reference
  collection?
• How could it be easier to find context of any
  museum object, document, or performance What is
  related to it in what it is, where it came from,
  when it originated, and who was associated with
  it?
• Distinguishing WHAT, WHERE, WHEN, and WHO
  provides a useful infrastructure to facilitate
  this kind of context building

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Vocabularies are the key
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Metadata Infrastructure 4 Ws
Biographical Dictionary
Who?
Thesaurus/ Ontology
Texts
EVI
What?
Where?
Gazetteers
captions
Maps/ Geo Data
Numeric datasets
When?
Time Period Directory
Time lines, Chronologies
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Early Prototype interface
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Related places
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Potentially related people
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Potentially related periods
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Find out more about this area.
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Different Browsing Options!
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More information about the country of India
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ECAI Cultural Atlases presenting history in its
geographical chronological contexts
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Simpler Geographic interfaces are now available
using Google Earth
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Some issues with clutter
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Can be handled by the time bar
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Other Data

• Different collections of bibliographic data can
  also be visualized in the same way
• In conjunction with our colleagues at the
  University of Liverpool and using data from the
  Incunabula Short Title Catalog (ISTC) from the
  British Library, we have created a Google Earth
  Timemap that can show the spread of printing in
  Europe from 1450-1500

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ECAI Cultural Atlases

• Access to most are available via a KML file for
  Google Earth
• Dozens of atlases ranging in time from 8000 BCE
  to 2006.

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Digital text
Named Entities
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Hovering over a named entity highlights the areas
where it appears in the text.
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Initially, named entities are linked to keyword
searches at the appropriate name authorities and
metadata services. Here we see a number of
possible candidates for Henry V.
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When editing an entity, the user can disambiguate
it by linking it to a specific record from a
naming authority. Here, the user is specifying
that this instance of Henry V refers to Henry
V King of England 1387-1422.
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Now that it has been disambiguated, the named
entity links directly to the appropriate record.