Humanities Database Biographies

Project Domain

This project focuses on researching and constructing biographies of digital humanities data sets and databases.  Data sets and databases have for more than 50 years played an increasingly significant role in humanities scholarship. Some were created by individual scholars and disappeared with their retirement or death, some, such as David J Herlihy’s (Brown University) and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber’s (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris)  Online Catasto of 1427, while still accessible are not being further enhanced, and some, such as the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names, are living projects that are both ongoing scholarly activities and provide a fundamental tool enabling researchers to make discoveries through data searches and analysis. It is this last class of data sets/databases that will be the focus of this project.

First Iteration

A first iteration of what will be an ongoing project is being conducted as part of the Jackman Scholars in Residence (SiR) 2023 program at Victoria College University of Toronto. In this proposed SiR Project, we will focus on constructing biographies of five such databases. The first phase of the project will involve selecting target datasets and data projects for phase I. Possible target databases and data projects for phase one might be: The Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, Lexicon of Greek Personal Names, Beazley Archive Pottery Database (BAPD), Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, Epigrafik-Datenbank Clauss-Slaby (EDCS), and The London Stage Database  1660-1800.

One of the first phases will be following unstructured examination of handful of databases will be the drafting of a set of criteria for selecting datasets for inclusion in the sample set. We will also agree a bibliographic template that we will use to collect key information about these data sets, such as scope, scale, imagined significance, subject domain, longevity, reputation, institutional context, accessibility, funding, technological infrastructure and so forth.

Scholars-in-Residence Jackman 2023 Project Objectives

1. To engage students in research.

2. To give students an opportunity to develop a perspective on digital humanities.

3. To construct and publish online biographies of six digital humanities databases.

4. To deploy and refine a methodology that students can effectively use for constructing biographies of humanities databases which captures bibliographic information, historical and contextual information about the process of building and using the database, and enables students to assess the evidence of the impact of the particular database on humanities scholarship in the relevant domain.

5. To encourage students to reflect critically on questions of data sustainability and project resilience.

6. To create a context where other researchers, students, and citizen scientists can debate issues of biographies of humanities data sets.