Social Networks and Archival Context Project (SNAC)
From the homepage:
The Social Networks and Archival Context Project (SNAC) will address the ongoing challenge of transforming description of and improving access to primary humanities resources through the use of advanced technologies. The project will test the feasibility of using existing archival descriptions in new ways, in order to enhance access and understanding of cultural resources in archives, libraries, and museums.
Archivists have a long history of describing the people who—acting individually, in families, or in formally organized groups—create and collect primary sources. They research and describe the people who create and are represented in the materials comprising our shared cultural legacy. However, because archivists have traditionally described records and their creators together, this information is tied to specific resources and institutions. Currently there is no system in place that aggregates and interrelates those descriptions.
Leveraging the new standard Encoded Archival Context-Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families (EAC-CPF), the SNAC Project will use digital technology to “unlock” descriptions of people from finding aids and link them together in exciting new ways.
On the Prototype page you will find the following description:
While many of the names found in finding aids have been carefully constructed, frequently in consultation with LCNAF, many other names present extraction and matching challenges. For example, many personal names are in direct rather than indirect (or catalog entry) order. Life dates, if present, some times appear in parentheses or brackets. Numerous names some times appear in the same <persname>, <corpname>, or <famname>. Many names are incorrectly tagged, for example, a personal name tagged as a
. We will continue to refine the extraction and matching algorithms over the course of the project, but it is anticipated that it will only be possible to address some problems through manual editing, perhaps using “professional crowd sourcing.”
While the project is still a prototype, it occurs to me that it would make a handy source of identifiers.
Try:
- Bush, Vannevar, 1890-1974
- Feynman, Richard Phillips, 1918-1988
- Oppenheimer, J. Robert, 1904-1967
- Sontag, Susan, 1933-2004
Or one of the many others you will find at: Find Corporate, Personal, and Family Archival Context Records.
OK, now I have a question for you: All of the foregoing also appear in Wikipedia.
For your comparison:
If you could choose only one identifier for a subject, would you choose the SNAC or the Wikipedia links?
I ask because some semantic approaches take a “one ring” approach to identification. Ignoring the existence of multiple identifiers, even URL identifiers for the same subjects.
Of course, you already know that with topic maps you can have multiple identifiers for any subject.
In CTM syntax:
bush-vannevar
href=”http://socialarchive.iath.virginia.edu/xtf/view?docId=bush-vannevar-1890-1974-cr.xml ;
href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vannevar_Bush ;
– “Vannevar Bush” ;
– varname: “Bush, Vannevar, 1890-1974” ;
– varname: “Bush, Vannevar, 1890-” .
Which of course means that if I want to make a statement about the webpage for Vannevar Bush at Wikipedia, I can do so without any confusion:
wikipedia-vannevar-bush
= href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vannevar_Bush ;
descr: “URL as subject locator.” .
Or I can comment on a page at SNAC and map additional information to it. And you will always know if I am using the URL as an identifier or to point you towards a subject.