Abstract
2wards a Transnational Biographical Infrastructure
2TBI has three main goals:
- Enriching and linking data on the life courses of transnationally mobile persons, starting out from a sample of Dutch social reformers in the period 1840-1914 and their participation in international congresses;
- Integrating (meta-)data on international organisations in the period 1914-1940, exploring the involvement of Dutch(wo)men;
- Feasibility study for the enlargement of the CLARIAH-person-entity portal towards the study of transnational cultural mobility in Europe and beyond.
The research pilot tests infrastructural improvements of CLARIAH components (in particular WP2), results in scientific output (one article on the infrastructural component and one on connections across borders), and advances the community of researchers into transnational biographies.
Dutch participants (black nodes) who attended more than 5 international congresses (brown nodes), visualized in Nodegoat
People
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Principal Investigator Maastricht University |
Project Team
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Judith Wolff Maastricht University |
Sebastiaan Derks Huygens ING |
Lodewijk Petram Huygens ING |
Jauco Noordzij Huygens ING |
Christophe Verbruggen Ghent University |
Sally Chambers Ghent University |
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Hans Blomme Ghent University |
Geert Kessels Lab1100 |
Pim van Bree Lab1100 |
Publications & Presentations
Deliverables
2TBI – Towards an International Biographical Infrastructure
The 2TBI-team set out to link a database of persons who were internationally active in the 19th and early 20th century, with online biographical resources in the Netherlands. To put it in plain terms, we wanted to know more about the local and national backgrounds of Dutch reformers who were involved in initiatives at an international level. The result of our endeavor is a selection of around 1100 Dutch persons, whom we can trace in various data collections (see the dataset on the Clariah infrastructure).
2TBI was important in gaining experience with the ResourceSync protocol for harvesting data. At the end of the pilot, the set-up of the ResourceSync connection between the Nodegoat software, used by the researchers (cf. the parent project TIC based in Ghent), and Anansi was running successfully.
Apart from the technical advances, the project also pursued promising research lines in transnational history. 2TBI’s research objective is to show to what extent and in which ways Dutch social reformers were active at the local level, on a national scale, and at international congresses, in order to explore the transnational embeddedness of the reform issues in which they were involved. Our (ongoing) research not only looks into the organizations which the reformers represented or were affiliated with, and which were mentioned in the congress proceedings, but also probes further into local and national backgrounds that emerge from other sources (national and/or specialized biographies, almanacs, address books, library catalogues digital resources, etc.). To our surprise, the names of quite a few internationally active reformers do not appear in standard national biographies.
Links between organizations and congresses, 1846-1914.
Source: visualization created in Nodegoat based on the 2TBI sample.
Organizations: red; congresses: brown (persons collapsed).
2TBI was carried out by teams at Maastricht University, Ghent University, Huygens ING and Lab1100.
Contact: Nico Randeraad,
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