The document summarizes research by the e-Humanities Group on linking the Short Title Catalogue Netherlands (STCN) as Linked Open Data. Key points discussed include: 1) Connecting the STCN to existing datasets like GeoNames and Picarta to infer related topics between publications and correlate publishing decisions to historical events. 2) Converting STCN data into RDF format including over 139,000 publications, authors, printers, and enriched concepts from sources like DBpedia and linking to standards. 3) Providing a web service called humR for conducting "distant reading" research using the STCN data, which allows formulating and testing hypotheses about publications and authors over time.

1. e-Humanities Group Research
Meeting: STCN
2013/10/10
Wouter Beek
Albert Meroño Peñuela
Rinke Hoekstra
Fernie Maas
Inger Leemans

2. ‘OPENING’ THE STCN
LINKING THE STCN

3. Open data

5. Linked Open Data
• Connect to existing datasets
• Connect to services
• Queries/inferences run across datasets
– The Picarta topic hierarchy allows us to infer that
certain publications cover related topics.
– GeoNames gives the latitude of publishing houses,
allowing publishing decisions to be correlated to
historical events.
– Lexvo / ISO standards allow translations to be traced
via related languages (e.g. language families).
• Easy to create mashups / new applications.

6. died in
Biografisch
portaal
same as

7. Taking the STCN to the Semantic Web
• 139.817 publications (4M facts)
• 23.543 authors (120K facts)
• 9.959 printers (55K facts)
• 37K enriched concepts (DBpedia, Yago, Heidelberg
Diglit, …)
• 105 topics (1K facts)
• Relate to international standards
(GGC/OCLC/ISO/RFC/IANA)
• Making the schema explicit (vocabulary)

8. RDF files
Domain-independent data conversions
fully automated
Relational DB
Domain-dependent data conversions
domain knowledge needed
domain knowledge
Simple RDF
Link to external sources (linksets)
domain knowledge needed
XML files
depends on structure
domain knowledge
Text files
ambiguous
Fixing bad data
origin inconsistencies
& inaccuracies
Connect to services
(e.g. query interface, maps)
high level of reuse

9. FROM THE LIBRARY TO THE LAB

11. “How many publications by Arminius?”

12. “How many publications by Gomarus?”

13. What happens to the average
publication format after 1619?
Measured in terms of the number of folds:
• Works by Arminius: 5.6  5.7
• Works by Gomarius: 6.8  4.9
Distant reading!

14. Methodological implications
From
searching for resources (librarian)
to
validating/refuting hypotheses
(scientist)

15. humanities + R (statistics
processing software)
A WEB SERVICE FOR
RESEARCH INVOLVING
DISTANT READING
humR

19. Open issues 0: institutional hurdles
• The products of publicly funded research
should be publicly available (papers&datasets).
– Not everybody makes their data publicly available.
• Distant reading research is often restricted by
the user interace.

20. Open issues 1: meaning
A large percentage of the data has no/unknown meaning:
• “before 1808”
• “This book was published between the Big Bang and
1808.”
Context-dependent:
• “The first dinosaur walked the earth before 300M years
BC.”
• “Einstein came up with the idea of general relativity
before 1937.”
Fuzzyness:
• “James Joyce’s Ulysses was published before 1925.”

21. Open issues 2: statistics
• Which query results are statistically relevant?
• How to detect whether a statistically significant
difference reflects reality and not the way in
which the dataset was constructed?