Linking the kingdom: enriched access to a historiographical text

Abstract

Digital history is a branch of digital humanities concerned using ICT to improve study of history. Linked Data provides a way of effective enriched digital access to scientific texts about history (historiographies). In this paper, we present a method for connecting a historiographical text to the Linked Data cloud. We present the method and tools that we use in each of the method's steps. We focus on one extensive case study: the enriched access of an important work of Dutch World War II historiography "Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog". We describe the digitization and present two sources of structured knowledge that link to individual text sources, retrievable on the Web of Data. The first is the manually constructed and highly curated "Back of the Book Index". The second is a list of extracted Named Entities. We compare both structured sources as stepping stones to the Web of Data and present a number of use cases relevant for both historical researchers as well as for the general public.