Keywords

Interactive platform
Jewish migration in Roman and Medieval periods

Short description

The CDH Research Software Lab has previously built an inscriptional database (PEACE) and an interactive map. Our purpose for this project is to integrate these into an interactive platform documenting Jewish historical migration into Europe during the Roman and Medieval periods, and to make this data available for further research as linked open data in RDF format.

For this purpose, we created the following building blocks:

a high-quality RDF dataset with proper documentation;
an interactive supporting website, which makes the dataset easily accessible and functions as a showcase for researchers who have similar needs;
a plan for integration of this dataset in education, in particular in the Heritage track of the RMA programme of Ancient, Medieval and Renaissance Studies;
an open access article describing the process of creating the dataset.

This project shows other researchers in Humanities and in particular Ancient History of Utrecht University how they can create and use open datasets for their own research. It will stimulate others inside and outside the university to use our data and build their own datasets upon it. The infrastructure that we create for our RDF dataset may be reused in similar projects.

The newly obtained knowledge will be available within the Faculty and the Centre for Digital Humanities. We hope that this will eventually lead towards a flexible and easy-to-use infrastructure for RDF datasets for historical research. We will do research about the way we translate our existing data into an RDF dataset and about how we set up an infrastructure to create, edit and publish the data. This research will be published as an academic publication.

Background

This project was a collaboration between Professor of Late Antiquity Leonard Rutgers, master’s student Stefan Dingemans, and CDH Research Software Lab developers Tijmen Baarda and Berit Janssen.

We wanted to understand the historical dynamics of migration and settlement of the single most important minority in European history, namely the Jewish community. We did this by collating data in a single spot (before this project, they existed only in a variety of printed publications that are not easily available) for the purpose of interlinking them, so that we can now begin to see and understand the larger patterns underlying Jewish historical migration over time for the first time.

This project should serve as a model for other historians/archaeologists to document the incidence of migration through time and place, using multidiscplinary datasets. We integrated various types of primary data (inscriptional, historical, archaeological and, down the line, genetic) into a single platform, so that researchers from different backgrounds (historians, archaeologists, heritage professionals, geneticists) can all benefnit from the integrated way we are presenting the evidence and are making it available. Importantly, we linked datasets that are typically studied separately due to disciplinary boundaries.