DOI: 10.18419/darus-2318
title: Data Collected During the Digital Humanities Project 'Dhimmis & Muslims - Analysing Multireligious Spaces in the Medieval Muslim World'

description: &lt;p&gt;
 This repository contains historical data collected in the digital humanities project &lt;em&gt;&lt;q&gt;Dhimmis & Muslims &ndash; Analysing Multireligious Spaces in the Medieval Muslim World&lt;/q&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.
 The project was funded by the VolkswagenFoundation within the scope of the &lt;q&gt;Mixed Methods&lt;/q&gt; initiative.
 The project was a collaboration between the Institute for Medieval History II of the Goethe University in Frankfurt/Main, Germany, and the Institute for Visualization and Interactive Systems at the University of Stuttgart, and took place there from 2018 to 2021.
 The objective of this joint project was to develop a novel visualization approach in order to gain new insights on the multi-religious landscapes of the Middle East under Muslim rule during the Middle Ages (7th to 14th century).
 In particular, information on multi-religious communities were researched and made available in a database accessible through interactive visualization as well as through a pilot web-based geo-temporal multi-view system to analyze and compare information from multiple sources.
 The code for this visualization system is publicly available on &lt;a href="https://github.com/UniStuttgart-VISUS/damast"&gt;GitHub&lt;/a&gt; under the MIT license.
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&lt;p&gt;
 The data in this repository is a curated database dump containing data collected from a predetermined set of primary historical sources and literature.
 The core objective of the data entry was to record historical evidence for religious groups in cities of the Medieval Middle East.
 In the project, data was collected in a relational PostgreSQL database, the structure of which can be reconstructed from the file &lt;a href="https://darus.uni-stuttgart.de/file.xhtml?fileId=96035"&gt;schema.sql&lt;/a&gt;.
 An entire database dump including both the database schema and the table contents is located in &lt;a href="https://darus.uni-stuttgart.de/file.xhtml?fileId=96387"&gt;database.sql&lt;/a&gt;.
 The PDF file &lt;a href="https://darus.uni-stuttgart.de/file.xhtml?fileId=90566"&gt;database-structure.pdf&lt;/a&gt; describes the relationship between tables in a graphical schematic.
 In the &lt;a href="https://darus.uni-stuttgart.de/file.xhtml?fileId=96386"&gt;&lt;code&gt;database.json&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; file, the contents of the individual tables are stored in JSON format.
 At the top level, the JSON file is an object.
 Each table is stored as a key-value pair, where the key is the database name, and the value is an array of table records.
 Each table record is itself an object of key-value pairs, where the keys are the table columns, and the values are the corresponding values in the record. 
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&lt;p&gt;
 The dataset is centered around the &lt;em&gt;evidence,&lt;/em&gt; which represents one piece of historical evidence as extracted from one or more sources.
 An evidence must contain a reference to a &lt;em&gt;place&lt;/em&gt; and a &lt;em&gt;religion,&lt;/em&gt; and may reference a &lt;em&gt;person&lt;/em&gt; and one or more time spans.
 &lt;em&gt;Instances&lt;/em&gt; are used to connect evidences to places, persons, and religions; and additional metadata are stored individually in the instances.
 &lt;em&gt;Time instances&lt;/em&gt; are connected to the evidence via a &lt;em&gt;time group&lt;/em&gt; to allow for more than one time span per evidence.
 An evidence is connected via one or more &lt;em&gt;source instances&lt;/em&gt; to one or more &lt;em&gt;sources.&lt;/em&gt;
 Evidences can also be tagged with one or more &lt;em&gt;tags&lt;/em&gt; via the &lt;code&gt;tag_evidence&lt;/code&gt; table.
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&lt;p&gt;
 Places and persons have a type, which are defined in the &lt;em&gt;place type&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;person type&lt;/em&gt; tables.
 Alternative names for places are stored in the &lt;code&gt;name_var&lt;/code&gt; table with a reference to the respective &lt;em&gt;language.&lt;/em&gt;
 For places and persons, references to URIs in other data collections (such as &lt;a href="https://www.syriaca.org/index.html"&gt;Syriaca.org&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href="https://imperium.ahlfeldt.se/"&gt;the Digital Atlas of the Roman Empire&lt;/a&gt;) are also stored, in the &lt;code&gt;external_place_uri&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;external_person_uri&lt;/code&gt; tables.
 Rules for how to construct the URIs from the fragments stored in the last-mentioned tables are controlled via the &lt;code&gt;uri_namespace&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;external_database&lt;/code&gt; tables.
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&lt;p&gt;
 Part of the project was to extract historical evidence from digitized texts, via annotations.
 &lt;em&gt;Annotations&lt;/em&gt; are placed in a &lt;em&gt;document,&lt;/em&gt; which is a digital version of a &lt;em&gt;source.&lt;/em&gt;
 An annotation can be one of the four &lt;em&gt;instance types,&lt;/em&gt; thereby referencing a place, person, religion, or time group.
 A reference to the annotation is stored in the instance, and evidences are constructed from annotations by connecting the respective instances in an evidence tuple.
&lt;/p&gt;
description: PostgreSQL, 10