Pieter Francois

Building the Seshat Ontology for a Global History Databank

This paper describes OWL ontology re-engineering from the wiki-based social science codebook thesaurus developed by the Seshat: Global History Databank. The ontology describes human history as a set of over 1500 time series variables and supports variable uncertainty, temporal scoping, annotations and bibliographic references. The ontology was developed to transition from traditional social science data collection and storage techniques to an RDF-based approach. RDF supports automated generation of high usability data entry and validation tools, data quality management, incorporation of facts from the web of data and management of the data curation lifecycle. This ontology re-engineering exercise identified several pitfalls in modelling social science codebooks with semantic web technologies; provided insights into the practical application of OWL to complex, real-world modelling challenges; and has enabled the construction of new, RDF-based tools to support the large-scale Seshat data curation effort. The Seshat ontology is an exemplar of a set of ontology design patterns for modelling uncertainty or temporal bounds in standard RDF. Thus the paper provides guidance for deploying RDF in the social sciences. Within Seshat, OWL-based data quality management will assure the data is suitable for statistical analysis. Publication of Seshat as high-quality, linked open data will enable other researchers to build on it.

Afterword: Ritual, Emotion and Power

Social scientists have long argued that collective rituals produce social cohesion and this has something to do with their emotionality. The fourteenth-century scholar Ibn Khaldun argued that emotionally intense rituals constituted a fundamental driving force in political history. In the medieval Muslim world, powerful dynasties commonly traced their ancestry from peripheral tribal groups, and urban elites were periodically overthrown and replaced by such groups. This pattern could easily be generalised to many other civilisations—from the dynastic cycles of China and Persia to the barbarian invasions of the Graeco-Roman and Christian worlds. Khaldun’s explanation for this pattern hinged on the notion of aṣabiyah (roughly ‘social cohesion’). Rural tribes derived their aṣabiyah from collective rituals that served to bond them into tight-knit military units, capable of standing together on the battlefield and carrying out daring raids. It was this quality of aṣabiyah that enabled rural tribes to invade and displace urban dynasties periodically. But having successfully deposed a ruling elite, the invading tribe’s emotional rituals would become sanitised and rendered ineffectual as part of the process of becoming educated into more literate forms and expressions of religiosity. Thus, the urban dynasty would become vulnerable over time to invasion and overthrow by another rural tribe, whose aṣabiyah remained intact. This cyclical theory of history has been taken up and developed in novel ways in recent decades.1 If emotional collective rituals do indeed unite groups, then they may be capable not only of motivating coups and rebellions but also of legitimating established authority structures. Voluminous literatures in the social sciences, commonly inspired by the functionalist logic of Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life,2 have provided ample examples of this legitimating role of ritual.3

Collaborative Historical Information Analysis

Patrick Manning, Pieter Francois, Daniel Hoyer, Vladimir Zadorozhny, ‘Collaborative Historical Information Analysis’, in Bo Huang, ed., Comprehensive Geographic Information Systems, (London: Elsevier, 2017 forthcoming), ISBN 978-0-1-28046-609.

The construction of a Whig interpretation of the Belgian past : British travellers and their attitudes towards the ‘Belgian’ past (1830-1870)

Abstract This article analyses the views of British travellers of the Belgian past for the period 1830–70. The article explores how the Belgian Revolution of 1830 and the closely intertwined rise of contemporary British sympathy for Belgium led to a reinterpretation of the ‘Belgian’ past. After 1830, the British interpretation of the Belgian past was increasingly centred on the sixteenth century and the ‘true’ Belgian national identity was believed to have been oppressed by a chain of foreign oppressors. Furthermore, the travellers saw the Belgian past and national identity as very similar to the British past and national identity. The view of the Belgian past was an integral part of the view of the Belgian future; a future that, so it was believed, would justify British claims that Belgium was a ‘little Britain on the Continent’ and that the Belgian and British national identities were highly similar. Finally, the article also explains why the interpretation of the Belgian past did not change once more after 1850, when the British increasingly lost their sympathy and interest in Belgium and the Belgians.