Nineteenth Century Digital Cooperative

The Nineteenth Century Digital Cooperative is an NHPRC/Mellon-funded Digital Edition Publishing Cooperative that seeks to aggregate facts about people, places, organizations, and events mentioned in scholarly editions of historic documents. It is composed of editors from The Papers of Abraham Lincoln, The Frederick Douglass Papers, and the Civil War Governors of Kentucky, with technical collaboration from Brumfield Labs and Perdue Digital Services.

NCDC is currently exploring Wikidata as a common infrastructure for storing these elements of biographical data, and is loading a test set of biographies into the platform as a feasibility study.

Open questions we are researching include:

• Will the Wikidata community veto entries for persons not considered notable?
• Will non-technical scholars be able to use the platform?
• Will we be able to map biographical facts from NCDC member editions onto Wikidata properties?
• Will we be able to filter facts by provenance in a shared environment?

This account is maintained by User:Benwbrum and User:Saracarl.