Biographical and Prosopographical Analyses of Finnish Academic People 1640–1899 Based on Linked Open Data

Abstract

This paper presents work on prosopographical data analyses using the AcademySampo linked data service and portal. The original primary data, based on ten man-years of digitization work, covers a significant part of the Finnish university history based on the student registries in 1640–1852 and1853–1899. They contain biographical descriptions of 28 000 students of the University of Helsinki, originally the Royal Academy of Turku. AcademySampo also sheds light to the academic history of Sweden and Baltic countries through their shared history with Finland in the larger Swedish empire. The Finnish student registries have been widely used by genealogists and historians by close reading. The main focus of this article is on the networks connecting the students and on knowledge discovered using this methodology. Networks connecting the students as well as their relatives mentioned in the data can be constructed based on various criteria, e.g., by genealogical relations, or by similarities on career by common vocations and employees. The student records already have a linkage to related Wikidata resources, which have been earlier used for enriching, e.g., the information about the relatives mentioned in the register descriptions. In this paper the biographical data is further extended by using Wikidata and by extracting further information and connections from the textual descriptions in Finnish, Swedish, or English Wikipedia. Although the descriptions in AcademySampo provide detailed data about the academic careers and family relations, the related Wikipedia entries can provide more details about their lifetime events with, e.g., their known locations of work or residence, topics of interest, lifetime events, or acquaintances. Topic of specific interest in this paper include: 1) Inheritance analysis of vocations and social classes in families. This analysis uses correlation matrices based on vocations of the students and their parents. 2) Quantitative analyses and visualizations of the family lines of students, based on automatically created family trees of the students and their parents. Family lines as long as eight generations can be found.