Analyzing the Lives of Finnish Academic People 1640-1899 in Nordic and Baltic Countries: AcademySampo Data Service and Portal

Abstract

This paper shows how the newly published Linked Open Data (LOD) service and semantic portal “AcademySampo - Finnish Academic People 1640-1899” can be used for Digital Humanities (DH) research. The original primary data, based on some ten man-years of digitization work, covers a significant part of the Finnish university history based on the student registries in 1640-1852 and 1853-1899. 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. We argue that unprecedented new possibilities for DH research are now enabled by using AcademySampo: the underlying knowledge graph can be accessed and analyzed using Semantic Web technologies and tools and with the ready-to-use data-analytic tools of the portal. Examples of data-analysis are presented by using the AcademySampo system for studying migrations of students in Finland, Sweden, Russia, and Estonia, history of student nations, inheritance of vocations and social classes, lengths of family lines of students, and network analyses of students. Related analyses have been made before using biographical dictionaries but not for academic history and student registries.