I'll be attending the #LODLAM meeting in San Francisco this June 2nd and 3rd focusing on using linked open data for archives and museums. The topic is close to some of my own interests, including those of The Muninn Project which has fairly complex modelling requirements. Recently in History Category
I'll be attending the #LODLAM meeting in San Francisco this June 2nd and 3rd focusing on using linked open data for archives and museums. The topic is close to some of my own interests, including those of The Muninn Project which has fairly complex modelling requirements. 
Do a billion documents change the First World War?
Wednesday, March 30th, 2011, 19:00-21:00
Waterloo Stratford Campus Digital Media Series
Presented by Rob Warren and Shelley Hulan
Wednesday, March 30th, 2011, 19:00-21:00
Waterloo Stratford Campus Digital Media Series
Presented by Rob Warren and Shelley Hulan
Abstract:
The First World War has come alive for later generations via their close reading
of individual works on the war. But this war was the first lengthy
international conflict to keep records on hundreds of thousands of
displaced people and military personnel as they moved all around the
globe, and the documents generated by them provide a rich source of
insight into the times, and in the wake of the large-scale digitization
of paper-based data from pre-digital periods, First World War records
have the potential to touch readers anew.
Where soldiers' journals and
longer accounts bring the conflict to light in a very personal way, the
digitization of millions of forms and official documents concerning the
"war to end all wars" allows for the detection of global patterns of
migration, communication, and disease previously impossible to find
using manual research methods. Mining Great War data might be feared to
rob the war of its power to illuminate the costs of modern conflict, a
power that has historically lain in the personal tragedies and triumphs
identified with it and the revelations they offer about human suffering
and human potential, not the more anonymous and repetitive information
on official forms. In a discussion of the patterns and trends detectable
by analyzing millions of data mine-able Red Cross files, however, we
will suggest that data mining both significantly alters our
understanding of the war and yet continues to move us in surprising
ways.
The website is now up for a project that I am involved with, focusing on the extraction of information from service of The Great War. The website is at www.muninn-project.org and is expected to handle over 600M pages and over 200TB of raw digital images.
