Historical Farm and People Registry in Iceland – Turning static list entries into network nodes
- Authors
The aim of developing the Historical Farm and People Registry is to create a reliable infrastructure for research involving data on people and places in Iceland from 1703 to 1920. This has been done by (a) establishing a reliable historical farm registry, (b) mapping census data onto the farm registry, and (c) connecting people between censuses, and thereby transforming the static lists of the censuses into an interconnected network of nodes. This presentation will outline the aim and scope of the project, explain the development process and problems encountered on the way, and demonstrate a use case for the ‘final’ product.
About the Speaker
Pétur Húni has extensive background in working with databases and web-technologies. He holds MA degrees in both Folkloristics and Medieval Studies, hoping to finish his PhD project on late-mediaeval rímur poetry this Spring, involving a research database of all extant late-medieval rímur poetry, lemmatised, pos-tagged. Among the projects he has been involved in are the ‘Icelandic Saga Map’ (sagamap.hi.is), the Nafnid.is database of placenames and toponyms at The Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies, and fasnl.net for the ‘Stories for all time’ research project based at The Arnamagnæan Institute in Copenhagen.
Video subtitles - Áine Foley
Learning Outcomes
After watching this video, learners will:
- appreciate the challenges of building a database from heterogenous legacy sources
- understand the steps taken in a network analysis workflow
- identify suitable data visualisation methods