Using the academysampo portal and data service for biographical and prosopographical research in digital humanities

Abstract

This paper presents the in-use AcademySampo portal and Linked Open Data (LOD) service for biographical and prosopographical research, a new member in the Sampo series of cultural heritage applications for Digital Humanities. The portal is based on a dataset of short textual biographies about all 28 000 Finnish and Swedish academic people educated in 1640 1899 in Finland. Linked data extracted from the biography entries was enriched by internal and external data linking, and by reasoning, e.g., genealogical networks of the people mentioned. The data was published as a LOD service. This paper demonstrates how to use the AcademySampo data in Digital Humanities research by faceted search integrated seamlessly with data analytic tools of the AcademySampo portal, as well as by using the LOD service directly via a SPARQL editor and by Python scripting using Google Colab and Jupyter notebooks.