F23: Week 8—Assigning Alt Names, Making Mentions, and Reifying Relationships

For our weekly meeting, I presented a brief introduction to what expectations are for encoding Alternative Names, Mentions, and Relationships with the Excel sheet. While the effectiveness of this introduction is unknown until its application, the encoding teams appeared to understand and raised no issue with these expectations. For the next weekly meeting on October 17, we plan to present a letter to familiarize the teams with the process of encoding in both EndNote and Excel. Hopefully, this presentation of the encoding process will make obvious any challenges team members might encounter when beginning the process for the individual libraries.

Explanations of structure involve outlining to users both the use and purpose of the Alt Names, Mentions, and Relationships. The use of Alt Names is to associate alternative spellings of names with a standard form established within the PRINT project; its purpose is to allow users querying the database with alternative forms of spelling to still find the individuals they are looking for. The use of Mentions is to record instances of subjects’ appearance within a letter in order to identify people’s location in place, time, and/or proximity to one another; its purpose is to fill gaps in the historical record and to populate data sets for the visualization of communication and travel networks. The use of Relationships is to identify people’s relationships to one another, with a purpose to generate social network visualizations and create linked open data sets containing and explaining these relationships.

Capturing Mentions is a vital part of constructing the networks that connect actors throughout the historical record. Linking individuals together within and between networks is an underlining, key goal to PRINT, and Mentions do a significant amount of work to create networks and make these connections. In order to achieve this, following procedures and protocols is crucial to capturing such instances according to machine-readable formats and standardizations. This is accomplished by project encoders having a strong grasp on the protocols and procedures.

With this in mind, it is important to provide users with both explanations of structure and illuminating examples containing instances of potential complications they may encounter. Providing visual aids helps users visualize how the contents of a letter is translated into machine-readable content for parsing and querying. Figure 1 shows how the Sender’s mention of an upcoming wedding is translated into metadata, as well as how Mentions can contain any number of information elements requested by the spreadsheet categories. Figure 2 shows how multiple lines are used to describe the same letter, which is rife with Mentions. It also demonstrates how we can construct information about transatlantic migration by tracking individuals and their plans for departing to Pennsylvania, creating a network of those who migrated together and adjacent to one another.

Figure 1 shows two instances of Mentions and how they are encoded.

Figure 2 shows how Mentions describe networks of migration and travel.

Connecting constructed datasets to wider scholarship networks is another underlining, key goal to PRINT. As such, protocols also need to be compatible with converting data to linked open data schemas. While the linked open data (LOD) component will occur later on, it is important to consider as we strive to make any project step as effective as possible. Creating data sets with linked open data in mind eases the transition from interior project use to external; it better facilitates the eventual import and conversion into LOD structures.