On my recent trip back to Singapore to visit family, I had the unexpected delight of getting together with nine lovely women whom I had not seen for years since graduating from high school. The party which met at our old high school biology cum chemistry lab (now a fancy restaurant named Chalk) was organized by my former classmate. I found her through social networking site, Facebook, in late December. Through her friend list and then friends of those friends, I’m now reunited with long-lost buddies from my adolescent years! These reconnections would not have happened without Facebook.
This got me thinking.
What if there exists an application that brings together historical figures, their friends and associates, and friends of friends such that the overlapping nature of those connections could be captured and visualized? A sort of Facebook meets LibraryThing … or to coin a name, HistoryBook, perhaps?
This concept is not new. Two computer scientists, Gijs Geleijnse and Jan Korst, mined the web to create a web of historical persons in their paper, Creating a Dead Poets Society: Extracting a Social Network of Persons from the Web, presented at the 6th International Semantic Web Conference back in 2007. By examining the proximity of data dimensions such as profession, gender, and nationality they extracted on a host of historical persons ranging from Johann Sebastian Bach to Napoleon Bonaparte, they created a map of social relationships among famous persons based on their similarity.
What I’m visualizing is a database of historical persons each with an person account that contains specific biographical data such as birth & death dates, dates of historical significance, timeline data tied to life events or historical events, and location data. Such data would be drawn from knowledgeable persons or subject experts such as scholars or cultural institutions, or even harvested from biographical databases, digital history projects, and other reliable sources on the Web. Then we could create links between related data in several ways. We could create links between individuals, between individuals and location information, and between individuals and historical events, say George Washington and Samuel Adams, and say the First Continental Congress (1774). Just like a person’s educational or work profile on Facebook surfaces relationships with other Facebook users who share overlapping characteristics, this application could bring to light interesting relationships in time and space, and provide opportunities to visualize social networks useful in historical research. And then just like in LibraryThing, standardized data captured from individual accounts could be aggregated and analyzed in interesting ways.
This would be another way to bring together biographical data, timelines, maps and GIS data, prosopographies, primary sources such as correspondence, journals, travel accounts, and genealogical data tied to historical figures and relate them in a common database. There are major funded efforts already in the works to bring scattered history websites and digital projects together in a global context over time such as MappaMundi and the ‘Discoveries’ of America project, part of the Global Middle Ages Project. I guess what I’m talking about is a collaborative and crowdsourcing effort along the lines of, for example, the Libraries of Early America project on LibraryThing, fueled by participation from scholars and history buffs beginning with a few eras, say the Early Republic, and then extending to other periods of American, Western, and world history.
A pipe dream, perhaps? There are certainly issues to overcome such as the challenges in representing dates, discrete versus spans of time, and a series of related events over long periods of time. I certainly don’t have a sophisticated data model to show. Nor have I attempted to describe any of this in RDF in my quick post here. I’ll leave that to the experts 
!
