The Meetup & Match-a-thon of the Historical Middle East Data Alliance takes place on June 5th and 5th, 2023, at the University of Vienna.
Are you a scholar of the historic Middle East, Near East, or West Asia, familiar with its geography and willing to contribute your expertise to the scholarly community? Or do you yourself have data with historical places or persons related to the region, which you would like to enrich with identifiers, geolocation, additional languages and scripts, or alternate name forms? Join us in this match-a-thon!
Digital projects on the history of the Middle East can struggle to connect their data to a linked-open data architecture because identifiers may be lacking or incorrect in commonly used authorities such as the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF) and Wikidata.
Meanwhile, it can be difficult to locate related data among the mass of individual datasets from other projects working across a variety of languages and scripts.
The Historical Middle East Data Alliance (Hist-ME) is an informal working group that exists to find ways of linking data from small projects together without extensive technical infrastructure on the projects’ part. The goals of this meetup are
- to match historical places and persons from attendees’ projects,
- to reduce the technical barriers to this kind of linking and reconciliation (including with algorithmic suggestions), and
- to network existing and new members.
We welcome participants who are working on the Middle East/Near East/West Asia in any time period and language. We also welcome those interested in observing the technical and methodological challenges of linking data in a linguistically diverse domain.
Register at https://events.gwdg.de/e/Hist-ME23.