This paper introduces the system ParliamentSampo – Parliament of Finland on the Semantic Web , a Linked Open Data (LOD) service, data infrastructure, and semantic portal for studying Finnish political culture, language, and networks of the Members of Parliament (MP). The article presents the vision behind the system, the LOD service, and explores the possibilities to utilize it in research and application development. A knowledge graph of linked data has been created based on ca. 962 000 speeches in all plenary sessions of the Parliament of Finland in 1907—2021; the data is also available in XML format, utilizing the new international Parla-CLARIN format. For the first time, the entire time series of the Finnish parliamentary speeches has been converted into data and a data service in a unified format. In addition, the speeches have been interlinked with another knowledge graph created from the database of the MPs and enriched from other data sources into a broader ontology-based data service. The paper shows how the LOD service SPARQL endpoint can be used to research parliamentary culture, the use of political language, and networks of politicians through data analysis. The service endpoint can also be used to develop applications for different user groups without programming skills, such as the ParliamentSampo semantic portal introduced in the paper, too. This application aims to make political decision making more transparent to the general public, media, politicians, and other end users.
This paper presents the vision of aggregating, harmonizing, and publishing letter catalog metadata (information e.g. of senders, receivers and datings of letters) from cultural heritage (CH) institutions in Finland as a single reconciled Linked Open Data (LOD) service and a semantic portal providing data analytical tools for researchers. The research is conducted as part of the consortium research project Constellations of Correspondence (CoCo). The target of the project is to study – for the first time – scattered, heterogeneous epistolary metadata regarding the period of the Grand Duchy of Finland (1809–1917) as one, integrated dataset and make it interoperable and available. This will enable scholars to ask ambitious research questions in the field of computer science and to conduct empirical, bottom-up case studies e.g. on epistolary culture, communicative networks, and heritagization processes. This paper discusses one of the first datasets acquired by the project, the letter collection of the Board of the Finnish Art Society (1846–1901), provided by the Finnish National Gallery, which contains details of c. 1150 letters sent or received by c. 400 actors.
This paper shows how various prosopographical phenomena can be highlighted and visualized in the WarSampo Knowledge Graph, which contains rich data about Finland in the Second World War in Linked Open Data format. WarSampo Portal contains tools for simple prosopographical data analysis of the person registers, and accessing the SPARQL endpoint directly opens up further possibilities in using the ontology infrastructure for enhanced information retrieval and pursuing comparative studies. This paper gives an overview of the possibilities of WarSampo, and presents examples of how WarSampo, and by extension Linked Data more generally, can be used to created various analyses to help with historical research.
This work focuses on questions of knowledge organization related to literary fiction. How can LGBTQI fictional literature become more accessible to readers and scholars? The project Queerlit Metadata Development and Searchability for LGBTQI Literary Heritage addresses this question in two ways: by the development of a thesaurus for the description of Swedish LGBTQI literature, and by building a curated bibliographical database for this material with flexible search options. Despite the community and scholarly interest in LGBTQI literature, relevant LGBTQI literature is hard to find both for readers and researchers. Subject indexing is underdeveloped for this topic, and subject headings have been historically inadequate and offensive. The paper focuses on how LGBTQI literature can be made more easily accessible through subject indexing. This will make new research possible, such as gaining overviews of the development of specific themes over time, the presence of LGBTQI literature within or outside of the literary canon or in different genres and changing ideas and perceptions concerning sexualities and gender identities. It will also accommodate user’s needs of better access to LGBTQI themed fictional literature.
This poster describes the creation and publication of a curated, cumulative, open – living – bibliography of the organisation Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries (DHNB). It recounts how the bibliographic material - conference abstracts, posters, peer-reviewed papers, journal articles, but also news items about the conferences, blog posts, forum posts - has been collected in a Zotero library. It discusses ways of documenting and archiving the bibliography both as a set of research data in a Dataverse repository and as an open Zotero group library. The poster concludes with the prospect of opening up the bibliography to become a community driven project that will be expanded and maintained by the DHNB community and made explorable for research both as a live bibliography and as a data set for further analyses.
