Kirsi Keravuori

Biographical collections are available on the Web for close reading. However, the underlying texts can also be used for data analysis and distant reading, if the documents are available as data. Such data is usable for creating intelligent user interfaces to biographical data, including Digital Humanities tooling for visualizations, data analysis, and knowledge discovery in biographical and prosopographical research. In this paper, we re-use biographical collection data from a historiographical perspective for analyzing the underlying collection. For example: What kind of people have been included in the collection? Does the language used for describing female biographees differ from that for men? As a case study, the Finnish National Biography, available as part of the Linked Open Data service and semantic portal BiographySampo – Finnish Biographies on the Semantic Web is used. The analyses show interesting results related to, e.g., how specific prosopographical groups, such as wom...

This paper argues for making a paradigm shift in publishing and using biographical dictionaries on the web, based on Linked Data. The idea is to represent biographical data in a harmonized, semantically interoperable form, which enables 1) data enrichment by aggregating linked content from complementary, distributed, and heterogeneous data sources, as well as 2) by reasoning. Based on the aggregated global knowledge graph, published in a SPARQL endpoint, tooling for 1) biographical research of individual persons as well as for 2) prosopographical research on groups of people can be provided. As a demonstration of these ideas, we discuss the new in-use linked data service and semantic portal ’BIOGRAPHYSAMPO – Finnish Biographies on the Semantic Web that quickly attracted thousands of end users on the Web. This semantic portal is based on a knowledge graph extracted automatically from a collection of 13 100 textual biographies, written by 980 researchers. The texts are enriched with d...

This demonstration paper introduces the semantic portal ”BiographySampo – Finnish National Biographies on the Semantic Web” released on September 27th 2018 for public use. BiographySampo aims to make a paradigm shift in publishing biographical dictionaries on the web. Firstly, the system provides the end user with an enhanced reading experience of biographies by enriching them with data linking and reasoning. Secondly, the BiographySampo includes versatile tooling for 1) biographical research of individual persons as well as 2) prosopographical research on groups of people. BiographySampo generates for each person and place in the system a global ”home page” for enhanced reading experience by enriching data from various interlinked data sources and by reasoning. The system is based on a Linked Data service on top of which seven application perspectives with tooling are provided. 1. Persons. Semantic faceted search view for filtering and finding protagonists of the biographies in fle...

This paper argues for making a paradigm shift in publishing and using biographical dictionaries on the web, based on Linked Data. Firstly, a biographical dictionary on the web should provide the end user with an enhanced reading experience of biographies by enriching them with data linking and reasoning. Secondly, the web publication should include not only biographies for humans to read but also versatile tooling for 1) biographical research of individual persons as well as for 2) prosopographical research on groups of people. To support these arguments, we present the designing principles and the implementation of the semantic portal ”BiographySampo – Finnish Life Stories on the Semantic Web” especially from the end user’s point of view. The system is based on a Linked Data service and knowledge graph extracted automatically from a collection of 13 100 textual biographies, written by 900 researchers. The texts are enriched with data linking to 16 external data sources and by harve...

This paper presents the vision of publishing and utilizing textual biographies as Linked (Open) Data on the Semantic Web. As a case study, we publish the live stories of the National Biography of Finland, created by the Finnish Literature Society, as semantic, i.e., machine “understandable” metadata in a SPARQL endpoint using the Linked Data Finland (LDF.fi) service. On top of the data service various Digital Humanities applications are built. The applications include searching and studying individual personal histories as well as historical research of groups of persons using methods of prosopography. The biographical data is enriched by extracting events from unstructured and semi-structured texts, and by linking entities internally and to external data sources. A faceted semantic search engine is provided for filtering groups of people from the data for prosopographical research. An extension of the event-based CIDOC CRM ontology is used as the underlying data model, where lives ...

Informaatiotutkimuksen tavoitteena on kehittää uusia tapoja tuottaa, organisoida ja käyttää tietoa sekä yksilöiden että organisaatioiden näkökulmasta. Tässä katsauksessa esitellään kulttuurihistoriallisen tiedon tuottajia ja käyttäjiä palvelevan ns. Sampo-mallin sovellus Biografiasampo kansalaisille, digitaalisten ihmistieteiden tutkijoille ja uusien sovellusten kehittäjille. Biografiasammon kunnianhimoisena tavoitteena on käynnistää uusi aikakausi elämäkertakokoelmien julkaisemisessa ja käyttämisessä verkossa semanttisen webin teknologioita ja linkitetyn avoimen datan julkaisuperiaatteita hyödyntäen. Innovaationa on luoda kieliteknologian, tekoälyn ja semanttisen webin teknologioiden avulla elämäkertojen teksteistä ja niihin eri lähteissä liittyvistä tietokannoista tietämysverkko (knowledge graph) osana kansallista tietoinfrastruktuuria. Sovelluksen ydinaineistona ovat Kansallisbiografia ja muut Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seuran toimittamat ja julkaisemat pienoiselämäkerrat, yhteen...

How can the private, everyday letters written by two literate members of a rural community be used as historical sources? How can they enhance understanding of the process of upward social mobility which took place in Finland in the latter part of the 19th century and produced a new, Finnish-speaking and nationally oriented university-educated gentry? A collection of nearly 150 letters written from 1858 to 1887 by country skipper Simon Jansson and his wife Wilhelmina document in great detail their daily life and thoughts as well as the news and the social life of their seafaring community. They attest to how non-elite families were able to grasp the opportunities that were opening up for them and to give their sons a university education. For a country skipper, the favourable economic conditions for peasant seafaring after the Crimean War were decisive. The process of social mobility and the rise of the new educated elite have been studied with the social status and occupation of the students’ fathers as a starting point. The Jansson letters show that the social and cultural capital brought into the family by the mother could be crucial.

How can the private, everyday letters written by two literate members of a rural community be used as historical sources? How can they enhance understanding of the process of upward social mobility which took place in Finland in the latter part of the 19th century and produced a new, Finnish-speaking and nationally oriented university-educated gentry? A collection of nearly 150 letters written from 1858 to 1887 by country skipper Simon Jansson and his wife Wilhelmina document in great detail their daily life and thoughts as well as the news and the social life of their seafaring community. They attest to how non-elite families were able to grasp the opportunities that were opening up for them and to give their sons a university education. For a country skipper, the favourable economic conditions for peasant seafaring after the Crimean War were decisive. The process of social mobility and the rise of the new educated elite have been studied with the social status and occupation of the students’ fathers as a starting point. The Jansson letters show that the social and cultural capital brought into the family by the mother could be crucial.

At a time when an estimated five percent of all Finns were able to write, from 1858 to 1887, country skipper Simon Jansson and his wife Wilhelmina from the southwestern archipelago carried out an extensive correspondence with their three sons. They wrote almost 150 letters which document the daily life of the family and the everyday events of the seafaring community in great detail. The letters offer insight into the motivations of the self-taught parents who struggled to give their sons a university education, as well as into the conflicts arising from the growing social and cultural divide between the two generations. They also reflect the many expedients resorted to by a family of limited means to raise money for their sons' education. The bilingual (Finnish and Swedish) letters of Simon and Wilhelmi-na Jansson are read as egodocuments, historical sources in which the authors write about their own acts, thoughts and feelings, as defined by Rudolf Dekker. Using French and Dutch theoretical discussion as a framework, Islanders seeks to demonstrate how these private and quoti-dian writings can contribute to our understanding of the worldview of 'ordinary' 19 th-century people. A close reading of the Jansson letters highlights the role of women as transmitters of social and cultural capital in the process of upward social mobility, which has traditionally been analyzed through the occupation of fathers. They also indicate that in seafarers' families the domestic gender division of labor could be very flexible. Nineteenth-century Finnish peasant families, often looked at through texts written by contemporary university educated gentry, have been seen as emotionally reserved and even harsh with their children. The Jansson letters challenge this view: although direct verbal expressions of affection may be scarce, the overall tone and the practical care for the sons' wellbeing testify to warm family relations.