The Semantics of History. Interdisciplinary Categories and Methods for Digital Historical Research.

Esther Travé Allepuz; Pablo del Fresno Bernal; Alfred Mauri Martí; Sonia Medina Gordo

doi:10.9781/ijimai.2021.02.002

Authors

Esther Travé Allepuz Universitat de Barcelona
Pablo del Fresno Bernal Sistemes de Gestió de Patrimoni SCCL.
Alfred Mauri Martí Centre d’Estudis Martorellencs.
Sonia Medina Gordo Universitat de Barcelona

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.9781/ijimai.2021.02.002

Keywords:

Ontologies, History, Archaeology, Databases

Supporting Agencies

This study is part of the current research tasks carried out by the Medieval and Postmedieval Archaeology Research Group GRAMP.- UB (2017-SGR-833-GRC) at the University of Barcelona, to which the authors belong, and it is included in our Landscape Archaeology research line. Theoretical development, conceptualization, and applied methods are part of funded research projects developed by the Centre d’Estudis Martorellencs (CLT009/18/00036 – DGPC/exp. 35) and the University of Barcelona (GREYWARE PID2019-103896RJ-I00). The authors wish to thank Ms Noemí Travé for language edition and review.

Abstract

This paper aims at introducing and discussing the data modelling and labelling methods for interdisciplinary and digital research in History developed and used by the authors. Our approach suggests the development of a conceptual framework for interdisciplinary research in history as a much-needed strategy to ensure that historians use all vestiges from the past regardless of their origin or support for the construction of historical discourse. By labelling Units of Topography and Actors in a wide range of historical sources and exploiting
the obtained data, we use the Monastery of Sant Genís de Rocafort (Martorell, Spain) as a lab example of our method. This should lead researchers to the development of an integrated historical discourse maximizing the potential of interdisciplinary and fair research and minimizing the risks of bias.

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