AbstractThis article examines a historical dataset of Indonesian pilgrims traveling to Mecca between 1851 and 2016 to reflect upon the epistemological and political dimensions of quantification. Drawing on debates in digital humanities and critical data studies, it makes the case that quantitative historical data, and statistics in particular, are neither self-evident nor neutral but deeply embedded in changing worldviews and governance practices. While this seems to be widely accepted in terms of multimodal qualitative data, quantitative datasets are often perceived misleadingly as straightforward, with little discussion on how the numbers are produced. In this article, with this specific case, I argue that historical quantitative data should be treated in the same critical way. Using the concept of “storied statistics”, the study discusses how colonial authorities monitored the Hajj pilgrimage to prevent anti-colonial sentiment, later reframing it as a story of prosperity. By tracing the entanglement of Hajj statistical records with colonial and post-colonial agendas, the article argues that quantitative data must approached with the same scrutiny as qualitative data.
Maximilian Görmar, Thea Lindquist, Eetu Mäkelä, Christoph Boveland
Library catalogues have been recognised as an important source for studying book production and knowledge exchange. The bibliographic data stored within them is increasingly regarded as research data for quantitative analysis. This data, however, presents researchers with challenges, since they are using it for purposes different from those originally intended. This paper identifies some of these challenges and presents practical solutions used to address them through two exemplary workflows that leverage the potential of the Verzeichnis der im deutschen Sprachraum erschienenen Drucke des 17. Jahrhunderts (VD17), or German retrospective national bibliography for the seventeenth century. These workflows illuminate the ways in which the VD17 metadata standard and scholarly interventions to facilitate use of bibliographic data for historical research can shape our view of the past.
David Lindemann, Gustavo Candela, Alessandro Marchetti, Camillo Carlo Pellizzari di San Girolamo, Ismael Olea, Christos Varvantakis, Tiago Assis, Vera Moitinho de Almeida, Ángel Obregón Sierra, Ana Salgado, Alice Santiago Faria, Christof Schöch, Luis Trigo
DARIAH-EU Working Group DHwiki presents this White Paper about Wikibase and the Wikibase Ecosystem as a digest of its permanent activity in providing documentation about MediaWiki-based software solutions to researchers. The output of the Working group is accessible on its Wikibase instance at https://dhwiki.wikibase.cloud. As diverse as the Working Group itself is the target group of this report: DH researchers, GLAM institutions, contributors to the software platforms provided by Wikimedia, and software developers. When starting to engage with Wikidata and Wikibase, we have seen ourselves sometimes lost in a diverse landscape of disperse documentation resources with different scope and aimed at differently skilled readers. With this contribution, we hope to provide a comfortable pathway towards adopting Wikibase in FAIR Linked Data publishing and collaborative data curation workflows.
