Item talk:Q24
And silently we have passed the 100,000th item on FactGrid! It is a person – Conrad Alexandre Gerard, just the ideal pick. FactGrid has been diving into networks obscure and less obscure. Gerard is travelling on both sides: The first ambassador of France in the United States – and a person interested in Mesmerism, miraculous cures involving “animal magnetism” in the 1780s. Our project started with the German Illuminati and spread into Freemasonry, student corporations, weird and weirder groups that organised themselves under quasi masonic rules, in Orders and Circles. Gerard is again a perfect traveller on this map: born in France in # he made a diplomatic career that brought him to Vienna and eventually to Virginia.
The project is deeply indebted here to Bruno Belhoste who has begun to feed the Harmonia Universalis database into FactGrid where Parisian Mesmerism of the 1780s and 1790s is now stretching out into the spheres of Masons and Illuminati. J.J.C. Bode’s brought these worlds together on his journey to Paris in the summer of 1787 – the journey that marked the end of the Illuminati-project since Bode would no longer resume his tasks as the last active secret superior after his return to Gotha and Weimar. Mesmerising is the right word since Franz Anton Mesmer will stand in the centre of this exceptional scene.
FactGrid has been set up to give historical data a wider outreach and it seems that this is what we can actually offer. We welcome joint ventures between platforms. We love to give data an additional platform. We hope this can give items far wider connections, contexts of research, which other projects will provide on the platform. Our software is designed to encourage such mergers of data.
Bruno Belhoste’s project will deserve a longer blog post in 2020; it will take him another two or three months to feed all his data into the database and to offer a first more substantial insight.
Looking backwards: we grew much faster than expected
The 100.000th edit is more of an opportunity to simply look back and to speak about the open developments on the site. Collective editing on FactGrid started on June 11, 2018. We began with Illuminati data from our own project and from the preceding projects of Hermann Schüttler and Reinhard Markner. The Illuminati project unfolded and it seems it has an open future: We have entered negotiations with Berlins Three Globes lodge and the Privy State Archive in Berlin with the aim to make the scans of the central archival tradition – scans of the so-called Swedish Box – available online.
The Wikibase installation invited local projects: would citizens of Gotha be able to work on one platforms with scholars who follow their international projects. Gotha’s City Church Archive welcomed the invitation to create an online catalogue of their files on FactGrid. Heino Richards of the city’s Geneology Association began an enormous project transforming the Pfarrerbuch of the former duchy into a database version. The network of the former territories 140 pastorates is the backbone of this projects. Slightly less than 2000 pastors have filled positions in these pastorates since the Reformation. The database has linked them to their parents, their spouses and their respective parents and is now on its way to add the children of all these pastors –all in all some 15,000 datasets, so the present estimate.
The Illuminati invited a growth into the sphere of Freemasonry: Hermann Schüttler had already identified about 100 lodges with members of the Order. Christian Wirkner brought his dissertation on Göttingen’s two late 18th century Lodges into the system with some 800 entries of members which inspired Martin Gollasch to widen the scope with his research on the beginning of German’s student fraternities. We are now beginning to understand how the “Landsmannschaften” together with a couple of quasi masonic organisations who recruited students at the central protestant university cities, formed the ground on which the early 19th-century Burschenschaften emerged in the years of the Napoleonic wars. Martin Gollasch’s data sets have been adorned with intimate information about small circles of friends that travelled through these wider groups thanks to his mining of contemporary “books of friends”, of “albums amicorum” which students were keeping in order to gather entries of their dearest friends.
Bruno Belhoste’s and David Armando’s data will widen this scene towards France. One thing has already happened with this new project: Bruno Belhoste has effectively turned FactGrid from a bi-lingual into a trilingual project. All our properties are now available in German, French and English. The interface is already speaking Russian and Chinese; so we might not have reached the end of the ladder here.
Tim Herb created FactGrid Q-Numbers for all the verses of the (Protestant) Bible with the aim to connect these to all the people mentioned in the Biblical texts. Wikibase would be the ideal place to create the links between all these people – genealogically and historically. The project is interesting as the Bible was up into the 19th century the central source historians would access to get things right wherever ancient historians had fallen into the taps of Greek and Roman mythologies. Wikibase allows contradicting statements. How would a FactGrid fare with the competing chronologies of modern and early modern historians? How would the project develop with the competing information of the two testaments and the Quran? The project is hibernating – and an open challenge at this point. The Bible on FactGrid has, in the meantime the charm, of being able to connect: We might develop a new Focus on early modern networks of religious dissent and here we will be able to spot the Biblical books that drove these networks: the books of the prophets and the apocalypse. We should be able to see how the Bible was used in competing groups with diverging aims, so the potential here.
Still other projects are basically seeds: We would love to inspire the Lodges all around the Globe to map their loges and their affiliations back into time. Membership lists, and institutional interconnections between systems and with their developing sources of rites should be the thing FactGrid can actually visualise on timelines, tables and maps and link to historical sources that are so far dispersed without a more cohesive database mapping. So far FactGrid knows some 850 lodges mostly in the former German speaking territories thanks to a test input of GND data sets. Freemasonry should be the ideal partner to dare the global historic perspective on the complete network that became so immensely influential in the late 18th century.
...and ahead: a year of massive challenges
With all these projects one could call 2019 a year of cautious consolidation. We have grown faster than expected but we remained a platform of cooperating projects, which basically generated their data more or less from the scratch. 2020 will be different. The GND input will catapult FactGRid into the league of public sites that offer millions of data sets – on organisations and places, so the primary aim. Shall we draw a line with 1950 to avoid the present production of data? Shall we include the whole GND to operate as complete DNB-data-provider? How will we manage the input? How will we make this input available? How will we make sure that we will not become a concrete cube of data, which only few SPARQL-specialists will be able to mine?
We will not start with the community Wikidata could generate from within the previous Wikipedia projects. We will have to address historians, libraries and archives with this asset – without the help of a coherent history that led to this compound.
The ideal scenario will be that Wikidata fans adopt this project as part of a wider range of Wikibase projects. So far, however, we do not have a global Wikibase-world. We only have the Wikidata world, interested so far in their child, Wikidata. And FactGrid will be different, less open when it comes to creating accounts – more open when it comes to organise experiments in the fields of academic research we are trying to address.
If you experience with Wikibase and Wikidata and love historical research or library data, you should join the team, which we will have to form in the wake of the big input. If you belong to the worlds of historians, librarians and archivists interested in big data you might be just as inclined to see this project as yours. We want to turn the GND into a treasure you can both edit and explore ad libitum.
The project will need a new technical basis. We will need an interface to meet the public – an interface that allows to handle the database without any knowledge of SPARQL. The interface should be multiligual. The output will look more like Reasonator pages than the present Wikidata-style pages, which primarily want to be edited.
So, quite some challenges ahead – but we think it will be an inspiring way to walk. The software is incredibly cool. It will continue to open doors into new projects. This is what the past year has taught us.