Archives, linked data and the digital humanities: increasing access to digitised and born-digital archives via the semantic web

Abstract

Mass digitisation and the exponential growth of born-digital archives over the past two decades have resulted in an enormous volume of archives and archival data being available digitally. This has produced a valuable but under-utilised source of large-scale digital data ripe for interrogation by scholars and practitioners in the Digital Humanities. However, current digitisation approaches fall short of the requirements of digital humanists for structured, integrated, interoperable, and interrogable data. Linked Data provides a viable means of producing such data, creating machine-readable archival data suited to analysis using digital humanities research methods. While a growing body of archival scholarship and praxis has explored Linked Data, its potential to open up digitised and born-digital archives to the Digital Humanities is under-examined. This article approaches Archival Linked Data from the perspective of the Digital Humanities, extrapolating from both archival and digital humanities Linked Data scholarship to identify the benefits to digital humanists of the production and provision of access to Archival Linked Data. It will consider some of the current barriers preventing digital humanists from being able to experience the benefits of Archival Linked Data evidenced, and to fully utilise archives which have been made available digitally. The article argues for increased collaboration between the two disciplines, challenges individuals and institutions to engage with Linked Data, and suggests the incorporation of AI and low-barrier tools such as Wikidata into the Linked Data production workflow in order to scale up the production of Archival Linked Data as a means of increasing access to and utilisation of digitised and born-digital archives.