Overview

Project Description

CENDARI Is a European Infrastructure project funded by the EU for 4 years: 2012-2016.

The Collaborative EuropeaN Digital Archive Infrastructure (CENDARI) will provide and facilitate access to existing archives and resources in Europe for the study of medieval and modern European history (specifically the First World War period) through the development of an ‘enquiry environment’.

This environment will increase access to records of historic importance across the European Research Area, creating a powerful new platform for accessing and investigating historical data in a transnational fashion overcoming the national and institutional data silos that now exist. It will leverage the power of the European infrastructure for Digital Humanities (DARIAH) bringing these technical experts together with leading historians and existing research infrastructures (archives, libraries and individual digital projects) within a programme of technical research informed by cutting edge reflection on the impact of the digital age on scholarly practice.

Lead institution: Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland

Partner institutions: Die Freie Universitaet Berlin (FUB) Germany, Mathematical Institute of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (MISANU), Serbia, University of Birmingham, UK, Georg August Universitaet Goettingen, Germany, Czech National Library, Czech Republic, International Society for the Study of Medieval Latin, Italy, Fondazione Ezio Francheschini, Italy, Bibliothek fuer Zeitgeschichte, Germany, Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique, France, Consortium of European Research Libraries, UK, The De Koninkljike Bibliotheek - European Library, Netherlands

Research Agenda

  • to develop a portal that allows integrated discovery of and access to resources held in the participating archives and other web-accessible resources, in coherence with the architecture and functional specifications defined by project partners (WP8)
  • to develop functionalities that allows integrated discovery of and access to resources held in the participating archives and other web-accessible resources
  • to develop an enquiry environment that
    • provides shared access to tools for integrating and processing data;
    • provides a collaborative space for sharing and discussion;
    • supports the research lifecycle of the targeted communities
  • to develop visualisation tools and services to ensure that available information can be maximally exploited by researchers according to his/her research interests

For more details, see project proposal pdf

Participatory Design Session

Relevant Visualization Tools for Historians

  • Gigsaw multiple views of documents and entities to illuminate connections between entities across the documents.
  • EOSDIS online user interfaces to facilitate browsing and retrieval of data from a large dynamic archive of scientific earth data, using dynamic queries and query previews.
  • Europeana4D supports multiple queries for temporal geo-spatial data.
  • WorldCat explore and search using identities network
  • Smile widgets open source web widgets
  • Parallel tag clouds visualizes differences amongst facets of large metadata-rich text corpora.
  • Aduna Autofocus combines a network view of query constraints with faceted navigation
  • Bubble sets visualizes relationships between sets of documents.
  • VisBricks multiform visualization of large inhomogeneous data
  • VisGets search interface based on time, location and topics.
  • Scented Widgets visual cues added to common widgets to facilitate search

Project Meetings

  • 11-09-2012 General meeting with a historian and digital humanities expert. [notes]

Technical Resources

  • EAD data structure and data interchange standard compliant with XML
  • TEI a standard for translating print display into machine actionable markup for online presentation
  • XTF search platform for providing access to digital content, supports EAD, TEI and other data formats.
  • Liferay portal and CMS, a customisable web platform
  • Blacklight customisable user interface for Solr index (uses Lucene Java search library).
  • d3js Javascript library with powerfull visualization components and data-driven appraoch to DOM manipulation.

Academic Resources

  • Youn-ah Kang, Carsten Gorg and John Stasko. How Can Visual Analytics Assist Investigative Analysis? Design Implications from an Evaluation. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 17:5, 570-583, May 2011. [pdf]
  • Chris Weaver, David Fyfe, Anthony Robinson, Deryck W. Holdsworth, Donna J. Peuquet and Alan M. MacEachren. Visual Exploration and Analysis of Historic Hotel Visits. Information Visualization, 6:1, 89-103, February 2007. [pdf]
  • UC Berkeley. Flamenco Search Interface Project. [webpage]
  • Human Computer Interaction Lab, University of Maryland. Hierarchical faceted metadata. [webpage]
  • Michael Bostock, Vadim Ogievetsky and Jeffrey Heer. D3: Data-Driven Documents. IEEE Trans. Visualization & Comp. Graphics (Proc. InfoVis), 2011. [pdf]