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Ideas

This version was saved 13 years, 5 months ago View current version     Page history
Saved by Gavin Bell
on October 13, 2010 at 2:19:28 pm
 

Ideas

 

- Historiography Hack: When you're an undergraduate, the majority of your essays require you to read around a particular issue, and essentially review/condense the opinions of other historians into an essay, comparing, contrasting, reviewing, and then adding in a little of your own flavour as well. We already have the established pattern of footnotes to provide references (links?) back to the original sources (primary/secondary). What I'm interested in is - what does a 'web-native' essay of this style look like? I don't think it's just a block of text with clickable footnotes (a la Wikipedia), but something a bit more - each argument/idea by a historian should have a URI, and the essay is essentially a Web of links between historians, ideas, events etc etc. So, history essay + linked data/semantic web = what? Something to explore.. (hack idea by Paul Rissen - http://www.r4isstatic.com)

 

- BigDate Hack: The Javascript Date class (and in fact just about all temporal data on the web) is derived from the ISO8601 specification. This spec models the Gregorian calendar. This makes working with historical dates prior to 1582 (when the Papal Bull reformed the Julian calendar) complicated and error prone. I'd like to see an expanded Date class / library to simplify working with historical dates beyond the Gregorian calendar. Here's a couple of posts that explain the problem in a little more detail: http://www.computus.org/journal/?p=1721 and http://www.computus.org/journal/?p=1800 . UPDATE: thanks to @pigsonthewing for pointing me to EDTF http://www.loc.gov/standards/datetime/ Looks like there's some progress being made at last on historical dating. {Hack idea by John Dalziel @crashposition }

 

- NovelContext: A old (ish) idea, take out-of-copyright books, in particular Victorian novels set in London, extract the real world places and people from them and link them to each other and to wikipedia/freebase. Thus being able to discover that Sherlock Holmes may have met Dorian Grey, or that speaker's corner features in dozens of novels. Creating the links that would have been there if the internet had existed when they were published. Additionally generating external links from historical sources to the books, eg from the newspaper reviews of the time to the books too. (hack idea by Gavin Bell gavinbell.com @zzgavin 

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