Visualize This! and Orlando’s first linked dataset release

Compute Canada’s 2018 Visualize This! competition, hosted by WestGrid, is underway and we are thrilled that Orlando’s first linked dataset is the subject of the humanities visualization challenge.

The Orlando British Women’s Writing Dataset Release 1: Biography and Bibliography is drawn from Orlando textbase content, developed by project members at the University of Guelph, and structured by the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory’s linked data ontologies as well as a number of external ontologies and authorities. It represents, through more than three million linked data assertions or triples, much of the biographical matter and all of the bibliographical records in Orlando, linking its assertions to their crucial contexts in the discursive prose of the published textbase. The dataset is a work in progress which will be expanded and refined with subsequent releases, and vastly enriched by the extraction of materials associated with writers’ careers and works. It has a CC-BY-NC license. Our development and release of this first dataset is part of our long-term of open data, in large part because we think it provides a means of representing the project’s feminist understanding of literary history while interacting with other representations and conceptions of the world.

Visualize This! closes on 30 November. Watch this space for news about the creative ways participants explore and represent the dataset, encouraging new ways of understanding and using Orlando.