Work on nodegoat started in October 2011 when Joep Leerssen approached Pim van Bree and Geert Kessels to develop a visualisation of a set of historical letters. The first version of this visualisation was a diachronic spatial data visualisation built in JavaScript. This visualisation still runs at http://projects.lab1100.com/labmap/.

Based on this project, Pim van Bree and Geert Kessels founded the company LAB1100 to continue to work on data related topics within the realm of the humanities.

Since 2011 LAB1100 has developed an online research environment that is able to host research data as well as provide various modes of analysis and visualisation. This online research environment was initially called the 'Chrono Spatial Research Platform'. In 2013 its name changed to nodegoat (which is now a registered trademark in the EU and US).

From 2012 onwards, free individual hosted accounts have been provided to scholars who want to use nodegoat to host, analyse, and visualise their data. These accounts can be requested here. We currently provide over a thousand of individual scholars with a free personal research account. You can explore a number of use cases here.[....]

nodegoat Poster at DH2017. Click on the poster to open the vector image in a new window.

With this poster, nodegoat will be present at this year's ADHO DH conference in Montreal, Canada.

We also present a long paper on the iterative data modelling methodology. We'll talk about the benefits of this approach in relation to teaching data modelling and data modelling as a research practice. This presentation is based on the three blog posts we published earlier this year:

• What is a Relational Database?
• Formulating Ambiguity in Databases
• Iterative Data Modelling

More info on the conference session in which we present our paper can be found here. Below you find the slides and abstract of the paper.[....]

As a result of our cooperation with nodegoat's institutional partners, we have been able to develop a RESTful API for nodegoat.

The API provides an additional interface to query and store data to your Projects in nodegoat. We have integrated the API with nodegoat's core functionalities and have optimised it for large operations. The API can also be used to update the data Model, which allows you to update specific attributes of a Type, or upload a whole data Model with multiple Type templates in one go.

You can use the Project settings to configure what parts of your data are exposed through the API. The API can be configured to require authentication or allow for public access.

Documentation for the API is available via the nodegoat Documentation. To learn how you can query your data to use it in other applications, see: https://nodegoat.gitbooks.io/documentation/content/usage/API/query.html. To learn about storing your data using the API, see: https://nodegoat.gitbooks.io/documentation/content/usage/API/store.html.

In case you want to use the API with your own research data, get in touch!

We have enabled the API for a demo domain. You can access this domain by logging in to nodegoat.net with the username 'demo' and password 'demo'. The following cURL commands give you a JSON package with the information that has been entered on the French intellectual Ernest Renan. You can also click on the URL to view the output in your web browser.

curl http://demo.nodegoat.io/project/1/data/type/4/object?search=renan -X GET

or

curl http://demo.nodegoat.io/ngAQ3A96sAJ3kMmZiAQD3 -X GET

output:[....]

In the past years, we have given various nodegoat workshops to groups of scholars and students. Even though the entry level of the participants varied from workshop to workshop there were similar challenges that emerged every time. These challenges can be grouped into the following three questions:

1. What is a relational database?
2. My material is very vague/ambiguous/uncertain/contradictory/unique/special, how can I use this in a database?
3. How do I use the nodegoat interface?

nodegoat Workshop at the University of Luxembourg.

Since most of the workshops we give are nodegoat-specific, we aim to teach participants how to do data modelling from within the nodegoat interface. Because of this, and as a result of the usual time constraints (often half a day), we have to leave the first two fundamental questions largely untouched. To remedy this, we have written two blog posts in which we aim to cover the first two questions. The third question is being addressed in the nodegoat video tutorials, the FAQ & forum, and in the near future the documentation.[....]

Photograph of the staff of the International Institute of Bibliography, writing and classifying records

One of the most obvious questions to start with when working with structured data in the humanities is: what is data? Miriam Posner has captured this challenge in the title of her talk on this topic: 'Humanities Data: A Necessary Contradiction'. Oftentimes, scholars think about their research material in terms of nuances, vagueness, uniqueness, whereas data is perceived as binary, strict and repetitive. The realisation that nuances, vagueness, and uniqueness can also be captured by data in a database is something that has to grow over time.

As soon as we start talk about 'data' it is important to keep two things in mind. First, we should be ready to reflect on the fact that data oriented processes can dehumanise data. This process has been described by Scott Weingart in his essay on digitising and storing holocaust survivor stories. Even though we can efficiently organise large collections of data, the implications of this process have to be taken into account.[....]

Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. Room 100, including card catalogs

At a certain moment in your research process, you might decide that you need to order your material in a structured format. A reason could be that there are too many different people in your body of research and it's becoming hard to keep track of them, let alone their different attributes. Another reason could be that you have repetitive sources, like letters or books, that you want to store and include in your analysis.

In the old days, you would get yourself a card catalogue and start reworking your notes onto these little handy cards.[....]

Every bit of information that is entered into nodegoat can immediately be published through a public user interface. This allows the Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe to instantly publish articles and a wide range of research data. This data also includes a set of over 38.000 letters that can be queried through the public user interface. In this blogpost we discuss the steps we took to allow visitors to dynamically explore this dataset.

The Study Platform on Interlocking Nationalisms (SPIN) at the University of Amsterdam has created a dataset of metadata of over 38.000 letters of nineteenth century intellectuals. This data has been manually entered and imported semi-automatically (geo-referencing and disambiguating people was largely done by hand). Sources include a range of publications of letters, like Breve fra og til Carl Christian Rafn, med en biographi, plus two existing datasets: (1) the metadata of over 18.000 letters of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were provided by the Arbeitsstelle Grimm-Briefwechsel Berlin, and (2) the metadata of over 14.000 letters of Sir Walter Scott were provided by the Millgate Union Catalogue of W. Scott Correspondence; courtesy prof. Millgate & National Library of Scotland. The remaining 6.000 letters were entered by hand by SPIN, based on publications of letters of various other intellectuals throughout Europe. This means that the dataset is a combination of a number of personal networks and that we have an overrepresentation of letters sent by the people at the center of these personal networks.

This dataset is part of the Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe (ERNiE). ERNiE will include over 1.500 articles on topics and people associated with the era of romantic nationalism (e.g. Dress, design : Romanian, Karadžić, Vuk Stefanović, Felicia Hemans). ERNiE also includes other materials like monuments, architecture, art, and currency. ERNiE is coordinated by SPIN. The editor of ERNiE is Joep Leerssen.[....]

Next week there will be a nodegoat workshop at the 'DARIAH-EU Annual Meeting' in Gent. This event will take place on 10-13 October. The nodegoat workshop will be on Tuesday 11 October from 14:00 to 15:30. You can find the full program here.

There will also be a nodegoat workshop at the conference 'Creating Spatial Historical Knowledge. New Approaches, Opportunities and Epistemological Implications of Mapping History Digitally'. This conference is organised by the German Historical Institute in Washington DC. The conference takes place on 20-22 October. The nodegoat workshop will be on Thursday 20 October from 14.15 to 16.00. This workshop requires individual registration. The full program of the conference can be found here.

We have proposed a session at the THATCamp Amsterdam on Linked Data challenges. Together with Ingeborg van Vugt we plan to discuss the benefits and difficulties of Linked Data in the humanities.

After a stimulating Virtual Heritage Network conference last year in Maynooth, we look forward to this year's conference in Cork. The conference will take place on 8-10 December.[....]