Modelling the Enslaved as Historical Persons

Rick J. Mourits, International Institute of Social History
Thunnis Van Oort, Radboud University
Kay Pepping, Huygens Instituut
Pascal Konings, Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis
Britt Van Duijvenvoorde, Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis

Multiple parties publish historical data on persons living in the former Dutch colonies in Suriname and the Caribbean, in collaboration with knowledge and heritage partners and citizen scientists throughout this region and the Netherlands. As a result, historical person observations have been collected that can be used to reconstruct historical persons. To implement these person observations and reconstructions within a wider community and make them interoperable and accessible to the general and scholarly public, the use of a clear and systematic data model is required. Exchange of large volumes of data between different parties puts specific requirements on the data. For example, data needs to be shared and curated on a large scale. Therefore, the Dutch Digital Heritage Network (NDE) and Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science (2021; 2024) have appointed the Semantic Web as the standard for digital heritage data. The advantage of the Semantic Web, also known as the Resource Description Framework (RDF) or Linked Data, is that each bit of information in a dataset is described with a unique URI, which can be represented as Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) to retrieve and describe entities or properties. As a result, the Semantic Web makes it possible to effectively exchange data and write software, as long as multiple parties use the same URIs. To show the practical advantage of working with the extended data model, we wish to demonstrate at the DH BeNeLux 2025: 1) what the problems are for modeling historical person data slave societies 2) what the added value of the Semantic Web is by linking slaveholders in neighborhood registers and slave registers 3) show how the results can be shared in a data story and other online formats.

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 Presented in Session 14. Using Data and Language Models