How to standardize person and book data to study women's authorship Alica Montoya Amelia Sanz Suzan Van Dijk Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory
University of Guelph

Available under a CC-BY-NC license

 when="2019">2019 Title of work, Ontologies for Linked Data in the Humanities, 2019) prepared for the Ontologies for Linked Dara in the Humanities Workshop at the DH2019 conference in Utrecht, sponsored by the Alliance for the Digital Humanities Linked Open Data Special Interest Group, and organized by Kim Martin and Susan Brown with committee members Johanna Drucker, Ryan Shaw, Joseph T. Tennis, and Jasmine Drudge-Willson….

Researchers working on women's authorship before 1900 are faced by a number of unique problems related to the identity of the persons they study. Not only is biographical data on women before 1900 particularly scarce. Issues of (false) attribution are manifold, as well as pseudonyms, collaborative and diffuse authorship. In addition, the nature of women's intervention in the literary field - not only as authors, but also salon hostesses or patrons, (invisible) translators, editors, etc. - calls for specific ontologies in defining their role as Person. Yet commonly used vocabularies and authority files rarely take account of the variegated nature of these female interventions. The most fine-grained of these, such as the RDA Vocabularies, do not move beyond the traditional scribal roles of 'author', 'translator', 'editor', and a few others. In addition, even in cases where ‘standard’ authorship has clearly been established, VIAF is often incomplete or inaccurate regarding lesser-known female authors.

 women writers biographical data book data (edited)
How to standardize person and book data to study women's authorship Alicia MontoyaAmelia SanzComplutense University of MadridSuzan Van Dijk

Researchers working on women's authorship before 1900 are faced by a number of unique problems related to the identity of the persons they study. Not only is biographical data on women before 1900 particularly scarce. Issues of (false) attribution are manifold, as well as pseudonyms, collaborative and diffuse authorship. In addition, the nature of women's intervention in the literary field - not only as authors, but also salon hostesses or patrons, (invisible) translators, editors, etc. - calls for specific ontologies in defining their role as Person.

Yet commonly used vocabularies and authority files rarely take account of the variegated nature of these female interventions. The most fine-grained of these, such as the RDA Vocabularies, do not move beyond the traditional scribal roles of 'author', 'translator', 'editor', and a few others. In addition, even in cases where ‘standard’ authorship has clearly been established, VIAF is often incomplete or inaccurate regarding lesser-known female authors.

In short, there appears to be no single viable Linked Open Data standard that is usable for the taxonomies of reception and circulation in projects dealing with early modern female authorship. Combining different vocabularies, while allowing for the level of granularity required, produces a patchwork of data standards, and hence databases that are even harder to link to one another.

In this session, we will present very briefly some of these interoperability problems encountered by several research projects: in Ghent University Agents of Change: Women Editors and Socio-Cultural Transformation in Europe, 1710–1920, in Galway University, RECIRC: The Reception and Circulation of Early Modern Women’s Writing, 1550-1700, in Oporto University She Thought It: Crossing Bodies in Sciences and Arts, in Radboud University of Nijmegen MEDIATE: Middlebrow Enlightenment - Disseminating Ideas, Authors, and Texts in Europe, 1665 – 1830, and at the Huygens Institut in Amsterdam NEWW VRE (New approaches to European Women’s Writing.