Using LOD to crowdsource Dutch WW2 underground newspapers on Wikipedia
Channel: SWIB
Date: 21/12/2016

Talk by Olaf Janssen (Koninklijke Bibliotheek, national library of the Netherlands / Wikimedia Nederland) and Gerard Kuys (Wikimedia Nederland / DBpedia)
Title: Using LOD to crowdsource Dutch WW2 underground newspapers on Wikipedia

Abstract: During the second World War some 1.300 illegal newspapers were issued by the Dutch resistance. Right after the war as many of these newspapers as possible were physically preserved by Dutch memory institutions. They were described in formal library catalogues that were digitized and brought online in the ‘90s. In 2010 the national collection of underground newspapers – some 200.000 pages – was full-text digitized in Delpher, the national aggregator for historical full-texts. Having created online metadata and full-texts for these publications, the third pillar ''context'' was still missing, making it hard for people to understand the historic background of the newspapers. We are currently running a project to tackle this contextual problem. We started by extracting contextual entries from a hard-copy standard work on Dutch illegal press and combined these with data from the library catalogue and Delpher into a central LOD triple store. We then created links between historically related newspapers and used Named Entity Recognition to find persons, organisations and places related to the newspapers. We further semantically enriched the data using DBPedia. Next, using an article template to ensure uniformity and consistency, we generated 1.300 Wikipedia article stubs from the database. Finally, we sought collaboration with the Dutch Wikipedia volunteer community to extend these stubs into full encyclopedic articles. In this way we can give every newspaper its own Wikipedia article, making these WW2 materials much more visible to the Dutch public, over 80% of whom uses Wikipedia. At the same time the triple store can serve as a source for alternative applications, like data visualizations. This will enable us to visualize connections and networks between underground newspapers, as they developed over time between 1940 and 1945.

SWIB16 Conference, 28 - 30 November 2016, Bonn, Germany
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Licence: CC-BY-SA
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