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WP4: Socio-economic history

Work Package 4 focuses on the development of digital tools and data in the field of socio-economic history.

CLARIAH DataLegend offers tools to expand research using tabular datasets (Excel, csv, etc.), in particular in the field of social, economic and demographic history. With our assistance, researchers can convert their datasets to Linked Data and use SPARQL queries to publish these datasets and share results and data visualisations live on the web.

Besides providing advantages such as data curation, replicability and easy collaboration, Linked Data allows researchers to expand their research by connecting their data to other datasets. By doing so they can standardize variables, contextualize data, and even add new variables to their own dataset with ease.

For example, a dataset with individuals from 19th century Amsterdam can be connected to marriage certificates to retrieve biographical information, family relations, and occupations, to neighbourhood maps to plot where individuals lived, and to historical coding schemes like HISCO and HISCAM.

In a similar fashion, macro datasets can be linked to historical urban population figures (1300-2000), the Clio-Infra datasets with thousands of country-observations on a global scale (1500-2000), or to macro-observations for Dutch municipalities (1800-1970). As a result, researchers will be able to answer new questions with ‘old’ data, find new answers to old questions, and expand their research.

Examples of use of Datalegend tools