From Heurist to the Data Commons: Linked Open Data for Humanities Collections
Michael Lynch1, Tim White1 1University Of Sydney
Abstract
Heurist is a digital humanities database which allows researchers to build complex data collections. However, Heurist is difficult to maintain in a way which meets modern IT security and web performance standards.
We present a progress report on an ARDC-funded project to integrate Heurist into the ecosystem of digital humanities platforms, by migrating a significant digital humanities collection, Opening Australia’s Multilingual Archive, to Research Object Crate (RO-Crate), a static, file-based data collection standard.
We will demonstrate extensions to the web platform used in the Language Data Commons of Australia which use a modern web stack to enable rich search and discovery across textual, spatial and temporal data.
This approach allows legacy Heurist collections to be migrated to data formats which suitable for long-term preservation, and which can be explored and analysed using the next generation of text and data analytics tools.
Biography
Mike Lynch is a software engineer and group lead at the Sydney Informatics Hub with experience in research IT support, research data management and linked open data standards.
Tim White is a software engineer at the Sydney Informatics Hub at the University of Sydney with a background in astrophysics. He has previously held research positions at the Universities of Göttingen, Aarhus, Sydney, and ANU.