Towards a Future of Humanities Research: Bibliopedia, Linked Data, and the Problems of Data Silos

Conceived in part from the “Digital Textuality and Tools” Scholars Forum and in part through long conversations among the project’s participants, Bibliopedia has recently completed its second round of grant funding, an NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant. Bibliopedia performs advanced data-mining and cross-referencing of scholarly literature to create a humanities-centered collaboration and research platform. Designed for modularity and extensibility, it can search any resources that provide an Application Programming Interface (API) for data access. The prototype phase focused on crawling JSTOR for metadata about scholarly articles that mention an original text like The Travels of Sir John Mandeville; Bibliopedia then examines the articles for citations and saves the results in a publicly accessible database. The platform also enables human-machine collaboration to discover specific mentions of locations and citations in the critical literature. Most importantly, Biblopedia performs automated textual analysis, data extraction, cross-referencing, and visualizations of the relationships between texts and authors. It then transforms this information into linked open data, which enables visualizations of networks among the texts and authors, of citation relevance, and other unexpected aspects of the data.

Bibliopedia represents one possibility for an advanced research platform for humanities scholars. This paper will examine the motivations to build this tool and reflect upon the challenges and lessons learned during its latest phase of development as they relate to the future of humanistic knowledge production, the ways of working in the digital humanities community, and the possibilities of data- driven visualizations as aids to research. Bibliopedia argues for the necessity of linked open data, machine-friendly text formats, and open access publishing if we are to realize the potential of existing digital tools and technologies as spurs to innovation and research in the humanities.