Event Objects for Placial History

Karl Grossner, PhD

Stanford University Libraries

Events and places are entirely bound together, but data models for digital historical research do not typically reflect that bond explicitly. In this talk I will discuss conceptual, logical and database models that do tie them together, and have been implemented in a particular database schema and ongoing exemplar projects.

A central approach to researching and presenting history is narrative. Historical scholars produce narratives by the interpretive stitching together of selected elements of the historical record: observers’ first-hand accounts of events, many kinds of written and statistical archival records, the material evidence of cultural artifacts and human impact on the landscape, and other scholars’ written interpretations of these same things. Their arguments may be novel, or may extend, amplify or contest others’ selectively constructed chronologies. Effective, compelling, and intellectually honest historical narratives are based at least in part upon the most accurate chronologies achievable given an often sparse record. Historical narrative is often non-linear of course, but ordinarily proceeds from a clear “factual substrate” which includes sequential events.

As events are at the core of narratives are events, for many applications in digital history effective representations of events and related temporal objects, like processes are required. Of course not all inquiries are especially eventive, and no claim is made here for the purely 4-D view that everything is an event. Certainly not all historical data comes to us in a form that can be easily encoded as events, but events are remarkably comprehensive and multi-faceted information ‘containers,’ so it will be worth the effort in many cases to reorganize data that way. Events occur at one or more place and time, have agentive and non-agentive participants, in the former case performing purposive activity, in roles, either throughout or for some time during their temporal span. Event modeling is a critical element of what I’m calling a placial historical modeling approach. Geographer Doreen Massey described place as “the meeting up of histories,” a poetic view that might be readily explored computationally by modeling events, and has been echoed by Krzysztof Janowicz who suggests we can even “equate a place with its history.”

In recent dissertation research I developed a general, eventive model for digital representations of historical knowledge framed as six “geo-historical information constructs” (GHICs): (i) events and participation, (ii) place, (iii) historical process, (iv) groups and membership, (v) attribution to sources, and (vi) historical periods. The data models were implemented with several exemplar datasets in a spatial relational database. Since that time these models have met reality so to speak and undergone some revision and refinement.

I will discuss the GHICs for events and participation and for place, their somewhat shifting conception as ontology design patterns compatible with Linked Data principles, and ‘Poetry of History,’ a project analyzing a kinship network of 26,000 British notables, where they are being put to the test.