This blog post is part of a series on storing uncertain data in nodegoat: 'How to store uncertain data in nodegoat', 'Incomplete source material', 'Conflicting information', 'Ambiguous identities'.

You are often confronted with omissions or with inconclusive statements when you deal with historical source material. To let your dataset reflect the nature of your sources, it is important that you include these vague or uncertain statements in your data. This blog post will go over a number of strategies that will help you to deal with these cases in your nodegoat project.

A common scenario is a case where you lack information. When this happens, you can decide to leave a given description, date, or location empty. This gives you the ability to create a filter that finds the objects that have empty descriptions, dates, or locations.

In another situation you might encounter a source that is partially lacking. The source does provide you with some information, but is inconclusive about the certainty of the information. An example of this is the entry on John Chamberlayne in the Dictionary of National Biography:

Leslie Stephen, Dictionary of National Biography, v. 10 (Elder Smith & Co., 1887), page 9. Available at wikisource.

The first sentence of his entry reads: "CHAMBERLAYNE, JOHN (1666–1723), miscellaneous writer, a younger son of Edward Chamberlayne [q. v.], was born about 1666, probably in or near London."

We will discuss four strategies for accommodating this uncertain source: a true/false statement on certainty, a scale on the level of certainty, entering chronology statements, and entering geometries.[....]

This blog post is part of a series on storing uncertain data in nodegoat: 'How to store uncertain data in nodegoat', 'Incomplete source material', 'Conflicting information', 'Ambiguous identities'.

Most scholars think about their research material in terms of nuances, vagueness, and uniqueness, whereas data is perceived as binary, strict, and repetitive. However, working with a digital tool does not mean that you can only work with binary oppositions or uncontested timestamps. On the contrary: by creating a good data model, you are able to include nuances, irregularities, contradictions, and vagueness in your database. A good data model is capable of making these insights and observations explicit. Instead of smoothing out irregularities in the data by simplifying the data model, the model should be adjusted to reflect the existing vagueness, conflicts, and ambiguities.

Before you start to adjust your data model to accommodate uncertainty, you should first try to determine the causes for uncertainty in your data. Most forms of uncertainty in data can be grouped in three categories: incomplete source material, conflicting information, or ambiguous identities.

These types of uncertainty can be dealt with in different ways. The next three blog posts will walk you through a number of possible solutions. The described strategies are not the only possible solutions: each research question is unique and may call for a solution of its own.

Incomplete source material

When the information you need is not available, incomplete, or vague you have to decide if you want to leave the respective parts in your data empty or enter data based on inference or conjecture. Read the blog post 'How to store uncertain data in nodegoat: incomplete source material' to learn how to deal with incomplete source material.

Conflicting information

You might encounter conflicting source material. Two sources might differ about the name of a person, or the date of an event. To account for all possible perspectives, you can include the conflicting statements in your data. Read the blog post 'How to store uncertain data in nodegoat: conflicting information' to learn how to deal with conflicting information.[....]

The release of nodegoat 7.3 comes with a set of new features that have been developed in collaboration with various projects and institutes.

Repertorium Academicum Germanicum: Vague and Complex Dates

The Repertorium Academicum Germanicum (RAG) at the University of Bern has commissioned a major overhaul of the nodegoat dating functionality. With this development process, the core of nodegoat's date handling processes have been rewritten to account for date statements that are uncertain/cyclical/relational. These statements can be expressed using 'ChronoJSON' notation, to allow for a clean and understandable description of complex date statement. We used the EDTF format as a starting point for this development process, but had to conclude that this format was not equipped to make relational date statements or include custom periodisations (like 'Sommersemester').

With these new features nodegoat users can now make statements like 'letter X was sent two months after letter Y and two months before letter Z', or 'Person A graduated on one day two years before 1498 and two years after 1498'.

These features are completely integrated into all nodegoat's functionalities. This means that you can create complex filters that use relational or vague date statements, include these levels of vagueness in your visualisation, and make selections of data based on vague dates to perform network analytical calculations.[....]

In the next weeks nodegoat will be present at several conferences. Meet us in Mainz, Paris, Erfurt, or Pisa to learn more about nodegoat or discuss your nodegoat project with us.

Mainz: Networks Across Time and Space

During the 13th Workshop on Historical Network Research titled "Networks Across Time and Space" we will give a nodegoat workshop and present the recently developed analytical features of nodegoat. This event takes place on May 27th and 28th at the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur in Mainz.

Paris: Teaching History in the Digital Age – international perspectives #dhiha8

We will give a workshop with the title "Teaching Database Skills for Historical Research with nodegoat" on June 17th at the Institut historique allemand Paris. This workshop is part of the conference "Teaching History in the Digital Age – international perspectives #dhiha8".[....]

The MapModern project at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) which focuses on cross-border literary networks and cultural mediators in the hispanic world between 1908 and 1939, has recently published a dataset on translations and reviews in hispanic modernist journals. This dataset has been created in their nodegoat database and currently includes all translations or reviews from La Revista (Barcelona) from 1915 to 1936; the second period of Proa (Buenos Aires) from 1924 to 1926, and Sur (Buenos Aires) from 1931 to 1939. More data from Iberoamerican journals will be added in the future.

Laura Fólica and Ventsislav Ikoff have collected the data, Diana Roig Sanz is the PI of this project. With the help of the staff of the UOC library, the dataset has been made Dublin Core compliant. The dataset can be downloaded from the data repository of the UOC: http://hdl.handle.net/10609/86485, or from the EUDAT Collaborative Data Infrastructure which has assigned the dataset with a DOI: 10.23728/b2share.eb5c468d3dc3401c8b2fb4605d868a00. The suggested citation is: Translations and Reviews in Iberoamerican Modernist Periodicals (dataset) by Fólica, Laura; Ikoff, Ventsislav; Roig Sanz, Diana; Dec 12, 2018.[....]

Interactive nodegoat installation at the GRIMMWELT museum in Kassel. Photo: Harry Soremski.

Since nodegoat's conception in 2011 by LAB1100, in collaboration with Joep Leerssen of the University of Amsterdam, our web-based research environment is used in various configurations by individual scholars as well as by large scale collaborative research projects.

The first project that started to use nodegoat was the Study Platform on Interlocking Nationalisms for their Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe in 2011. Since then it has been used by over twenty institutional projects and we have provided over a thousand individual scholars with access to a free personal research environment on nodegoat.net. The institutional projects are hosted on a server of the institute, and are offered in combination with training, workshops, and support. The individual accounts are hosted on our own server, located in The Hague, The Netherlands.

Due to the flexibility of nodegoat, it can be used for a wide range of different kinds of research projects. This means that there is rarely only one project at a university or research institute that wants to use nodegoat as their primary tool of research. To be able to facilitate these multi-project configurations, we have been offering various installation packages and service level agreements in the past years. To streamline our services we have formalised these packages in three different nodegoat products: nodegoat One, nodegoat Grow, and nodegoat Go.

nodegoat One is suitable for institutes that want to run a single nodegoat project. nodegoat Grow is suitable for institutes that want to run a specific amount of nodegoat projects that each have their own database. nodegoat Go is suitable for institutes that want to offer any amount of nodegoat research environments to their staff and students.[....]

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.[....]