Charlotte Tupman

Exploring manuscripts: sharing ancient wisdoms across the semantic web

Recent work in digital humanities has seen researchers increasingly producing online editions of texts and manuscripts, particularly in adoption of the TEI XML format for online publishing. The benefits of semantic web techniques are underexplored in such research, however, with a lack of sharing and communication of research information. The Sharing Ancient Wisdoms (SAWS) project applies linked data practices to enhance and expand on what is possible with these digital text editions. Focussing on Greek and Arabic collections of ancient wise sayings, which are often related to each other, we use RDF to annotate and extract semantic information from the TEI documents as RDF triples. This allows researchers to explore the conceptual networks that arise from these interconnected sayings. The SAWS project advocates a semantic-web-based methodology, enhancing rather than replacing current workflow processes, for digital humanities researchers to share their findings and collectively benefit from each others work.