Wikidata talk:WP EMEW/People

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CCEd

Jheald (talk) PKM (talk) Colin Greenstreet (talk) DrThneed (talk) 02:45, 19 February 2021 (UTC) Piecesofuk (talk) 14:53, 19 February 2021 (UTC) Richard Nevell (talk)

Notified participants of WikiProject Early Modern England and Wales

Spatial Analysis of Early Modern Devon Schools

Spatial analysis of Early Modern Devon Schools Mariner Migration

Consider adding people constrained to dates 1500-1700 from Clergy of the Church of England Database (CCEd)

- Note: you can also extract clerical schools of different sorts and associate them with people, again constrained for 1500-1700

- This enables spatial representation such as in sample image below, which Colin Greenstreet is using in the Signs of Literacy project to link migration or non-migration to displayed levels of literacy for different occupational groups, and to understand how close their birth places were to clerical schools

-- ColinStuartGreenstreet (talk) 06:41, 26 February 2021 (UTC)

@ColinStuartGreenstreet: We have a property for CCed ID. So far, about 300 people in our period have Wikidata items matched to CCed IDs (see this query, sort by data of birth). There are ~192K people in CCed, but less than 1% of them are matched to Wikidata items so far. @Jheald: could you add Clergy of the Church of England database ID (P3410) to your external identifiers table with MnM catalog 312? (I don't quite understand the query well enough to do it myself.) - PKM (talk) 21:15, 26 February 2021 (UTC)

@PKM, ColinStuartGreenstreet: Done. Between Map of Early Modern London and National Library of Wales. Jheald (talk) 22:13, 26 February 2021 (UTC)

People of Middling Sorts

Jheald (talk) PKM (talk) Colin Greenstreet (talk) DrThneed (talk) 02:45, 19 February 2021 (UTC) Piecesofuk (talk) 14:53, 19 February 2021 (UTC) Richard Nevell (talk)

Notified participants of WikiProject Early Modern England and Wales

I would encourage you all to consider the value of a well disambiguated and academically validated data set of say 1000 to 10,000 "people of middling sorts" for the 1500-1700 for England and Wales. History should not be elite history. The challenge of writing history with a focus on the historical sociology and ethnology of individuals, kinship networks, local comunities, and strata or socio-economic constructs around non elite lower social and economic status people is good disambiguation and characterisation. But it has been done by a number of academics. I would argue for the inclusion of at least one such data set in Wikidata, since it will be transformatory in how people think and talk about people in the 1500-1700 period, and could be used very powerfully in workshops and interactions with users of wiki data, local historians and indeed academics. Suggest you talk to Dr Justin Colson (Essex), Dr Brodie Waddell (Birkbeck), or Dr Adam Chaman (IHR/UCL) on this subject. -- ColinStuartGreenstreet (talk) 22:21, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

Non elite Lower Social and Economic Status people

Jheald (talk) PKM (talk) Colin Greenstreet (talk) DrThneed (talk) 02:45, 19 February 2021 (UTC) Piecesofuk (talk) 14:53, 19 February 2021 (UTC) Richard Nevell (talk)

Notified participants of WikiProject Early Modern England and Wales

I would encourage you all to consider the value of a well disambiguated and academically validated data set of say 1000 to 10,000 "Non elite Lower Social and Economic Status people" for the 1500-1700 for England and Wales. History should not be elite history. The challenge of writing history with a focus on the historical sociology and ethnology of individuals, kinship networks, local comunities, and strata or socio-economic constructs around non elite lower social and economic status people is good disambiguation and characterisation. But it has been done by a number of academics. I would argue for the inclusion of at least one such data set in Wikidata, since it will be transformatory in how people think and talk about people in the 1500-1700 period, and could be used very powerfully in workshops and interactions with users of wiki data, local historians and indeed academics. Suggest you talk to Dr Justin Colson (Essex), Dr Brodie Waddell (Birkbeck), or Dr Adam Chaman (IHR/UCL) on this subject. -- ColinStuartGreenstreet (talk) 22:21, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

First goals

Possible initial goals, for discussion. You'll see I'm still trying to fit this all together in my head!

• Improve the Wikidata set of potential matches to EMEW people, by identifying datasets (like the CCed) that contain overlap with EMEW people, and assess their completeness, which ones it is a) desirable and b) possible to improve.

(This is where we are going with the identifiers section, yes?)

• Identify which parts of the VR/EMEW project are going to come up with notable people for Wikidata e.g. landowners, clergy, etc, versus the kinds of people we might never find in another database, or would not have enough data for to disambiguate even if we did.

(Saxton itself has no people, afaics, but the Burghley annotations do? I haven't seen the annotations to know what sort of information we are talking about. Does Leland talk about people much, and if so how? Where does the manors project fit, is it purely a Wikidata project or is there going to be a VR team as well at some point?) --DrThneed (talk) 01:47, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

@DrThneed: Manors is a Wikidata-original project, but we would hope to give VR a set of confirmed manor houses/manor settlements out of it. Large scale manor <-> people links possible, if we can use the http://www.inquisitionspostmortem.ac.uk/ dataset.

There are some Leland people-annotations on the sample page at Wikidata:WP EMEW/Wikisource (scroll down) -- a John Stradling (1425-1479) and a William de Londres (fl. c.1110). Identification and linkage to Wikidata may be very difficult. But it may be possible to find (some of) them on a site like ThePeerage or Wikitree and then identify them back - particularly if we are identifying them in the contexts of their families and their land-holdings.

I think the targets you've identified: identifying completeness and quality control of existing datasets, identifying appropriate additional datasets, and identifying subsets of items most likely to be relevant, are spot on.

One further goal may be to improve linkages within families, adding missing links, so eg property can be tracked down. There may be county-by-county lists of 'important' people in sources that could be mined, though I don't know how near-term a prospect that would be. As we probably wouldn't have the resources to do it, it perhaps has to be left to the genealogy sites (who perhaps have more specialist tools) and then for us to match to them. Jheald (talk) 19:59, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

ADDED: The edition of Leland we're using does have an Index of Gentlemen at the back. It's only 3 pages. But this could be compared against the Visitations, Genealogy sites etc, to try to make matches; perhaps as something that can be fast-tracked as a parallel workflow to the main transcription. It may also be worth trying to do something similar with the Index of Places. May be possible to use a Google sheet set up a bit like OpenRefine ? (Isn't the Met project with Andrew Lih (User:Fuzheado) doing something like this when it's matching?) Jheald (talk) 15:50, 28 February 2021 (UTC)

I'll have a go at the first page of the Index of Gentlemen just to see what sorts of issues that throws up. Not aware of the Met project so I'll check that out, thanks for the tip. One immediate comment looking at the index is that some people are mentioned by their title and some by their name. For those with a title we may wish to link to both the Qid for the position (Archdeacon of Brecon, for instance) as well as to our interpretation of which individual that means (based on the time period of Leland's travels, which I understand to be 1534–1539). I'll share a Googlesheet when I have something work looking at. DrThneed (talk) 01:25, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

@DrThneed: Regarding User:Fuzheado and the collaboration with the Met (Project pages here, which we can probably learn from), I was particularly thinking of some of the things on this slide from the talk he gave at WikidataCon in Berlin. (The whole talk is worth a listen btw, as a masterclass in building institutional engagement, design of processes, and building active participation). The wikipage underlying that slide is here: Wikidata:Linked open data workflow. One interesting thing that they're doing, that he mentioned a bit to me in the hotel beforehand, from the RECONCILE column, is the use of a PAWS notebook and a Google sheet to build what they call a "crosswalk database" of matched terms. The Google sheet sits on the Google server, where everyone can see it and edit it. The PAWS notebooks each contain some pre-written scripts in Python, that together can run data through a particular pipeline of processes, showing something of the output from each stage in the PAWS notebook document -- so when you fire one of these up, the first stage might be to pull data from particular Google sheet, and show a bit of it; the next stage may be to do some canned refinement operation, and make available the results of that; which you can then run through the next stage inside the document, etc; until you get to something you want to write back again. The beautiful thing is its very open and very shareable, making it possible to develop quite intricate processes and then share them for anyone to be able to look at and modify, or just use as is; and that the cloned notebook itself then becomes a record of all the actions that were taken.

So this is all something that is up there on my "very very interesting" list. Now I haven't used PAWS myself, I don't even really know Python, I haven't actually yet even looked at what the Met project have been doing (nor the kind of notebooks to clone that other PAWS people have been developing). But this seems to me extremely interesting tech to try to understand better, to see whether it provides a platform to allow the more intricate high-volume matching processes to be shared and re-used and applied by lots of project members, each taking them to their own corner of the data, rather a specialist arcane skill practiced by lone-wolf individuals. Jheald (talk) 08:58, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

@Jheald: Thank you for the links - that looks amazing, and very interesting. Bookmarking for when I have mental space to take it all in. I don't do Python either, but I'm interested in the collaborative possibilities of this kind of workflow. The minute I take anything into OpenRefine it becomes a me-project. And I don't find it useful way of working with data that may be tentative or need explanatory notes, like my Googlesheet above is full of. Food for thought here, thanks again.DrThneed (talk) 09:22, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

I've also asked User:Lesko987a, who does a lot of work matching in people to here from WikiTree, and is a leading member of the community there, to look by, and say what they would see as leading areas needing attention (for 1500s and 1600s people generally, not just those most likely to come up in connection with Viae Regiae). Jheald (talk) 22:00, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

I have checked what this is about and I can't help you with the details. You can probably ask in G2G on WikiTree for more info. I can provide you with some WikiTtree stats and data if needed. WikiTree has 170K profiles of people born in England in 17th century [1] and another 90K in 16th. To limit it to profiles connected from WikiData, there are 8000 of them [2] in 17 century and 7000 in 16th. For now we only populate P2949 to identify the link. We don't add any other data to WikiData, since I didn't figure out a way to maintain changes. I don't really want to do a one time import. But we could export birth and death dates and relatives. I was already looking into doing that, but didn't decide to do it for now. Maybe in the future. (Lesko987a (talk) 00:19, 28 February 2021 (UTC)).

People vs titles (or both)?

The Viae Regiae project needs to consider how we deal with people (for instance, in Leland) who are referred to by title rather than name e.g. "Duke of York". We might choose to link to the title and the individual who held it at the time Leland is referring to, or maybe just the person who held it and make sure that the person is entered in Wikidata & the gazetteer as having held that title. There will be some complications, e.g. the Duke of York was Henry Tudor until 1509 (Wikipedia, sourced to a book I can't access), or 1502 (Wikidata, sourced to English Wikipedia) but in practice until his death in 1548, in that there wasn't another Duke of York until the fourth creation in 1605.--DrThneed (talk) 03:22, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

@DrThneed: If we can identify that Leland is likely to be referring to a particular individual, then IMO that is the most preferable case. When Leland is clearly referring to a family, he still often does that by reference to a named person ("... held by X and his descendents since ..."); but if not, it's possible we may have an article "family X of Y". I'm not sure how our items on titled families work. In most cases I'm guessing they will have come into being to correspond to whatever was on a wiki page, and so that probably they are for the title, with sometimes encompassing multiple re-creations of the title, when it was held by different families in turn. Do we have an article for the Percy family of Northumberland, as a family, distinct from the Duke of Northumberland ? Not sure. Do we have an article for Duchy of Northumberland, distinct from Duke of Northumberland? Again, not sure. It may be worth us putting together some queries to try to make a systematic survey. Jheald (talk) 08:02, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

@DrThneed: @Jheald: I am quite excited by the interaction of Wikidata and Viae Regiae thinking on Leland Wales, and am delighted that DrThneed has joined the Leland Wales team (which Stuart Bain and Colin Greenstreet have welcomed with open arms. I continue to be interested in the exploratory work Jheald has been doing around possible Wikisource publication of the Viae Regiae Leland Wales annotations we will be creating -- ColinStuartGreenstreet (talk) 22:11, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

@Jheald: Thanks. I have certainly come across at least one case of Wikipedia pages for an individual, the individual's family and the hereditary title involved, which I think might be where we are headed. Anyway, I think for now I will keep recording Qids for titles alongside my interpretation of which individual that might be, not least because it will make it easier for whoever comes behind me to check my work. Then we can figure out later exactly how we want to reflect that in Wikidata/Leland links. @ColinStuartGreenstreet: If I ask to join any other bits of the project please tell me no!!! DrThneed (talk) 03:42, 4 March 2021 (UTC)