Hack a LOD presentation for Netwerk Digitaal Erfgoed NL

1. Ruben Schalk
r.schalk@uu.nl
Working with (lots of) historical persons:
LINKS/ Clariah WP4
HackaLOD
05-02-2021

2. Clariah WP4
• Online and (as much as possible) open access to all Dutch birth,
marriage, and death certificates from 1810
• Add relations between persons on all certificates using record linking
• Reconstitute families and family trees
• Facilitate linking with external datasets with historical person
observations

3. Clariah WP4 (2)
• Optimal data archiving through Linked Data: standardized sets
of variable names, new ways to estimate quality of matches,
and intuitive storage of linking quality.
• Framework to organize and store information on inequality
(and hopefully more in the future)
• Datahub for social and economic history

4. Importance: new research
• Multigenerational studies: social mobility, heritability.
• Add deep family relations to topics such as asset ownership
(Memories van Successie), strikes, business, mortality, fertility,
anthropometrics etc.
• Conventional research might require larger N than current
micro datasets can provide, for example longevity, birth
spacing, or sex-specific effects.
• Large geographic scope: migration and environmental effects.

5. Dataset(s): indexed civil registry (Burgerlijke Stand)
LINKS
- IISG project
- Data from CBG
- A2A XML > ACCESS > CSV
- Full names removed
- Data (not yet) public
Openarch
- Data from archives directly
- Available in A2A XML / CSV / TTL
- Open access!
- Not cleaned
- Potentially duplicates
- Doubles within archives
- Different archives indexing the
same certificates

6. Data pipeline
LINKS
- Cleaning by IISG similar to -->
- Documentation (almost)
available
- Scripts are not (yet)
- Lookup tables for occupations
and georeferencing (Amsterdam
code) available
Openarch
- Deduplication
- Adding amco’s to placenames
- Inferring sex by surnames
- Standardize ages
- Coding occupations

7. Data issues
- Missing a lot of occupations
(white regions)
- Ages as well
- Doubles remain an issue
- Not everything is indexed yet
- Emigration blind spot

8. Datasets compared (births)

9. Some results: excess mortality Spanish Flu (openarch)
https://stories.datalegend.net
/spanishFluNetherlands/

10. Record linking results: Zeeland
• Newborns > marriages • Parents of newborns > bride/grooms

11. RDF data model: retrieve relations
• Query from relation to relation with SPARQL
• Retrieve all associated information (locations, occupations, etc.)

12. Results: social mobility (LINKS Zeeland)
• Question: what was the average socio-eco occupational score of
fathers and grandfathers of newborns between 1850 and 1920?
• Occupation from birth certificates
• https://druid.datalegend.net/LINKS/-/queries/social-mobility-births/2
Birth certificate 1
- Newborn
- Father + occupation Birth certificate 2
- Father
- Grandfather + occupation

13. Mean Hiscam score of fathers and grandfathers

14. Results: social mobility 2 (LINKS Zeeland)
• Question: what was the average socio-eco occupational score of
grooms and their fathers - at their own marriage - between 1850 and
1920?
• https://druid.datalegend.net/LINKS/-/queries/social-mobility-
marriage/1
Marriage certificate 2
- Father groom + occupation
Marriage certificate 1
- Groom + occupation
- Father groom (+ occupation)

15. Mean Hiscam score of grooms and their fathers (at marriage)

16. Future plans
• Small-scale private releases in 2020/2021, public releases in 2022.
• Add income/wealth data on individual level
• Filling gaps in the civil registry: more info on wealth associated with
occupations
• Substantial challenges remain due to scale of data (e.g. hosting triples)
• Add as many interesting datasets as possible

17. Useful links
• Team page: http://www.datalegend.net/
• Datasets: https://druid.datalegend.net/
• Data stories: https://stories.datalegend.net/
• CSV to Linked Data conversion: https://github.com/CLARIAH/CoW/wiki
• Online SPARQL tutorial:
https://programminghistorian.org/en/lessons/intro-to-linked-data

18. Data: progress
• Comparing to known
birth/death totals.
• Noord-Holland (Amsterdam!)
and Zuid-Holland are the
biggest gaps in the data, but
in progress.
• Amsterdam archives
interested in completing their
civil registries (but $$$).
Birth Death
Drenthe 100.0% 114.5%
Friesland 101.9% 114.5%
Gelderland 103.9% 120.0%
Groningen 100.5% 115.3%
Limburg 105.1% 116.3%
Noord-Brabant 114.3% 149.4%
Noord-Holland 82.2% 61.8%
Overijssel 61.2% 113.5%
Utrecht 111.9% 126.5%
Zeeland 113.9% 121.9%
Zuid-Holland 74.2% 80.0%