An ecosystem for linked humanities data

Abstract

The main promise of the digital humanities is the ability to perform scholarly studies at a much broader scale, and in a much more reusable fashion. The key enabler for such studies is the availability of sufficiently well described data. For the field of socio-economic history, data usually comes in a tabular form. Existing efforts to curate and publish datasets take a top-down approach and are focused on large collections. This paper presents QBer and the underlying structured data hub, which address the long tail of research data by catering for the needs of individual scholars. QBer allows researchers to publish their (small) datasets, link them to existing vocabularies and other datasets, and thereby contribute to a growing collection of interlinked datasets.We present QBer, and evaluate our first results by showing how our system facilitates three use cases in socio-economic history.