Preliminary Programme

How can we understand land ownership as a social practice in a space founded on a supposed ethos of private property? My study focuses on the rural Great Plains of the United States during the first decades of Euro-American settlement. More specifically, I propose a qualitative and quantitative analysis of local archives in a township of western Kansas. Based on the records of the register of Deeds from the 1870s to the 1930s, maps drawn by atlases companies and school children in the 1900s and finally legal cases of dispute between neighbors.

I have transcribed the few hundred deeds covering the area, and spatialized every sale of land for the period through ArcGis. By analyzing patterns of prices, consolidation of land, and ethnicity, I aim to describe how a generational change happened in the 1900s leading to an increasing concentration of land. Certain communities disproportionally benefited from this reconfiguration. In a place hailed during the 19th century for its democratic pattern of settlement, what conflicts shaped the family farm of the 20th century?

To understand the cultural importance of these social shifts, I look at cartographic records of the township at the beginning of the 20th century. Both the county atlas (1901) and a series of township maps by schoolchildren (1910) speaks to the visibility of landownership in the community.

This ecology of knowledge radiated from vernacular knowledge of farmers and official knowledge of the local register of deeds. It was not only performed through township maps but also in the series of local trials on land disputes. There, land sales took on a different meaning. The legal cases reveal how social bonds in the community were primarily performed through mutual personal loans on land between farmers.

From ownership patterns to public display of cartographic knowledge, to invisible bonds of indebtedness, this study aims to unearth the social aspect running through the reductive definition of the plains as an individualistic “American dream.” (Show less)

The digital era changed the way of research in many fields. One of them, in which the advance was of the highest significance, was historical geography. Digital technologies brought not only different tools, but also developed new methodologies and allowed us setting different research goals. In this context one of the problems we would like to discuss is the case of historical atlases in digital era. Should we still develop such kind of publications? Do we need a systematic work program to reconstruct past space during exact historical periods? Or maybe this type of research lost its reason with the current development of digital techniques? Maybe we should just gather the data and model it? Or should we combine both ways?
Those kinds of issues we would like to discuss on the basis of our experience in elaboration the „Historical Atlas of Poland”. The beginnings of this project are strictly connected with the paper of Stanis?aw Smolka in 1880 which he presented during the first convention of Polish historians in Cracow. His idea of preparing such atlas was discussed by researchers from two major Polish cities. The scientific milieu in Cracow proposed research on the second half of the 18th century. The Warsaw scientific centre stuck to the concept of Smolka of examining the 16th century. Finally, in 1964 a new project of the „Historical Atlas of Poland” was conceived and a series called „Detailed Maps of the 16th Century” was developed. It contains a full reconstruction of settlement, ownership structure, administrative provinces, state and church divisions in the second half of the 16th century. Each band of the atlas has a main map in a scale of 1: 250 000, additional maps and cartograms in the scale of 1: 500 000, city plans in a scale of 1: 10 000, commentaries (methods and results) and indexes.
In recent years, new technologies helped us to develop various digital projects based on the „Historical Atlas of Poland”. Those were the „Atlas Fontium” platform (www.atlasfontium.pl), which is a space for researchers for publishing their data or results of their historical and geographical research, or INDXR application – a tool for preparing digital edition of historical manuscripts. Preparing the „Atlas” is currently based on data bases and GIS, which allows us to shorten the time needed for editing new volumes. Six volumes of this atlas has been prepared so far. Currently works on two new volumes are conducted – those will end in year 2020. This will be at the same time the end of whole series and abovementioned questions regarding the future of historical atlases arise. (Show less)

Data has always been central to social science history. However, the digital turn has brought new sources of data and new techniques to process them. These developments bring new challenges: sharing requirements, reproducibility, interoperability, data heterogeneity, and dealing with large datasets. Moreover, the FAIR data principles for scientific data management and stewardship have been established as a set of guiding principles to make research data findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable [1]. FAIR is steadily being promoted and established in various research fields. In this paper we discuss Linked Data (LD) [3] as a technology that can solve these issues for social and economic history; and introduce dataLegend [2], a new platform that makes this technology available to users with varying levels of technical proficiency. We explain the principles of Linked Data, the benefits for historians to make their datasets available as Linked Data, and introduce the tooling offered by dataLegend to convert, link, explore, query, and visualise Linked Data. The tool chain consists of: COW (for “CSV on the Web”), a programming library and command-line interface tool for converting CSV files into the Resource Description Framework (RDF) Linked Data format; Cattle, the online instance of COW, a Web service where users can instantly convert their CSV files without any installations; Druid, an online environment for uploading, querying and browsing the created Linked Data; and grlc, a server and method to store, share and execute queries easily [4]. Since social and economic history data is usually created and stored in tabular form, we will present various use-cases, taking multiple datasets and describing the entire conversion and linkage process, from tables to Linked Open Data, using the tools developed in dataLegend. We argue that the wide coverage of requirements from various end-user communities, and the end-to-end “from the desktop to the world” workflow make our infrastructure ideal to make social and economic history datasets more FAIR. (Show less)

“When we concentrate mainly on the links in information exchange, the patterns of the information networks almost draw themselves” – Charles Jeurgens.

At past European Social Science and History conferences the need for researchers and content providers to cooperate closely regarding research data and digital collections became increasingly evident. Particularly at the Spatial and Digital History network the combining of resources is rapidly becoming a requirement for success. Recently, at the Digital Humanities Benelux 2018 Conference, this necessity was, by a consortium of researchers and content providers (Düring et al., 2018), conceptualized in one word: “transparency” (p. 2). They argued that transparency is amongst other things, “(…) the effort to provide information which helps assess the provenance and quality of a born digital or digitized source” (p. 2).

This paper focuses on extracting, processing and visualizing the information regarding the provenance of humanities research collections. It reflects on the theory of Charles Jeurgens (2012) in relation to the provenance of collections and the creation of archival networks. The provenance of data and collections is visualized by processing data about the origin of the collections and using dedicated network software such and Palladio and Nodegoat (Palladio, 2019; Nodegoat, 2019).* The extensive collection of the Meertens Instituut (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences) are used as a use case in order to make the first steps in visualizing transparency of provenance (Jongenburger et al., 2013). And finally, the outcomes will be incorporated in my PhD research, which is about the history of the collections of the Meertens Instituut.

References

Düring, M., Bunout E., Claeyssens S., Chambers S., Hujnen P., Verheul and Neudecker, C. (2018). Transparency as a prerequisite for Digital Source Criticism for Digitized Newspapers. Paper presented at the Digital Humanities Benelux Conference 2018. Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Jeurgens, K.J.P.F.M. (2012). Information on the move. Colonial archives: pillars of past global information exchange. In Jeurgens, K.J.P.F.M., Kappelhof A.C.M. and Karabinos, M. (eds.), Colonial Legacy in South East Asia. The Dutch Archives. 's-Gravenhage: Stichting Archiefpublicaties, pp 45-65.

Jongenburger, W., Jansen, A.W.H and Zeldenrust, D.A. (2013). Collectieplan Meertens Instituut, 2013-2018. Amsterdam: Meertens Instituut.

Websites

http://ckcc.huygens.knaw.nl (Accessed January 18, 2019).

http://www.meertens.knaw.nl (Accessed January 18, 2019).

https://nodegoat.net (Accessed January 18, 2019).

http://palladio.designhumanities.org (Accessed January 18, 2019).

*As this research is ongoing, experiments with other network analysis tools will be considered. Various data visualization platforms and network architectures have been developed. For visualizing data Palladio is one of the platforms that can be used as a network tool for the humanities. It is built by Stanford University and recommended by several PhD students (Palladio, 2019). Nodegoat was used in the project ‘Circulation of Knowledge and Learned Practices in the 17th-century Dutch Republic’ (Huygens, 2019). (Show less)