Maps, Links, and the Globe: Using Linked Open Data to Improve Functionality in the Digital Humanities

The poster presents my undergraduate thesis project, which will connect the place names in Gregorio Dati’s La Sfera (The Globe) to the World Historical Gazetteer (WHG) repository via principles of Linked Open Data. La Sfera is a poem written around 1425 by Dati, who was a prominent Florentine merchant. The poem is written in four books, of which the first three detail the basics of astronomy, the elements, the humors, the seasons, the winds, navigation and basic geography. The fourth book provides an itinerary of major Mediterranean and Black Sea ports of the time. From the fourth book, the La Sfera Project has put together a digital gazetteer of all of La Sfera’s toponyms and their geographic locations. This digital project has taken over a hundred maps, and the toponyms contained in them, from individual manuscript copies of La Sfera to create a digital gazetteer displaying location, name or names, and any variants.

My thesis project will link the La Sfera gazetteer with the places and toponyms on the World Historical Gazetteer. The World Historical Gazetteer is a digital project based at the University of Pittsburgh which collects and connects topographic datasets in order to create, in effect, a gazetteer of gazetteers about historical places. Linking the Sfera Project toponym gazetteer with the World Historical Gazetteer will allow both projects to benefit: if for example someone searches for the city of Cairo on the WHG, they will be able to see that it appears in the work of Benjamin of Tudela (12th century), Ibn Battuta (14th century) and Dati’s Sfera (15th century). At the same time, if someone starts from the Sfera Project and becomes interested in how Dati talks about Cairo, they will have access to a link out from the Sfera Project to the WHG, where they will learn more about the city, and be able to see other texts in which it is mentioned, like Benjamin of Tudela or Ibn Battuta. This interconnectivity is, in many senses, the basis of my project. It enriches the user’s experience of both the WHG and the La Sfera Project with more detail, more specific reference information, and better access to other linked open data projects across the web, in their initiative to democratize access to data.