Wednesday November 21st, 11:00am-11:25am @ Rangimarie 1 - Breakout Room

Presentation Slides: https://slides.com/wragge/lodbook-3#/

Way back in 2012, I came to NDF and talked about bringing stories and data together. Now the adventure continues, with an update on a work that seems permanently ‘in progress’.

Back then I presented a hacky prototype for Linked Open Data enriched narratives. I was frustrated by the industrial scale of much LOD work, and wanted to use it as a way of capturing the research that goes into historical writing, of building gateways between publications and collections.

While I’ve never completely given up on this idea, I’ve tended to assume that someone with more resources and better coding skills would jump in and build a cool system that rendered my tinkering obsolete. But while a number of new platforms for online scholarly publishing have emerged over recent years, they still miss the mark. And so I’m trying again.

In this presentation I’ll describe my third (or is it fourth?) attempt to create a system for the creation and publication of LOD-enabled historical narratives — publications that enable readers to move easily between story and data, to explore contexts and perspectives. With technologies like JSON-LD becoming mainstream, some things are now much easier. But over the years, I’ve become increasing concerned with challenges around maintenance and preservation, and influenced by the principles of minimal computing. Will it ever be finished? Will I be bought by Google? Tune in for the next thrilling installment.

Tim Sherratt , University of Canberra, Associate Professor of Digital Heritage