Data Collected During the Digital Humanities Project 'Dhimmis & Muslims - Analysing Multireligious Spaces in the Medieval Muslim World'

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This repository contains historical data collected in the digital humanities project Dhimmis & Muslims – Analysing Multireligious Spaces in the Medieval Muslim World. The project was funded by the VolkswagenFoundation within the scope of the Mixed Methods initiative. The project was a collaboration between the Institute for Medieval History II of the Goethe University in Frankfurt/Main, Germany, and the Institute for Visualization and Interactive Systems at the University of Stuttgart, and took place there from 2018 to 2021. The objective of this joint project was to develop a novel visualization approach in order to gain new insights on the multi-religious landscapes of the Middle East under Muslim rule during the Middle Ages (7th to 14th century). In particular, information on multi-religious communities were researched and made available in a database accessible through interactive visualization as well as through a pilot web-based geo-temporal multi-view system to analyze and compare information from multiple sources. The code for this visualization system is publicly available on GitHub under the MIT license.

The data in this repository is a curated database dump containing data collected from a predetermined set of primary historical sources and literature. The core objective of the data entry was to record historical evidence for religious groups in cities of the Medieval Middle East. In the project, data was collected in a relational PostgreSQL database, the structure of which can be reconstructed from the file schema.sql. An entire database dump including both the database schema and the table contents is located in database.sql. The PDF file database-structure.pdf describes the relationship between tables in a graphical schematic. In the database.json file, the contents of the individual tables are stored in JSON format. At the top level, the JSON file is an object. Each table is stored as a key-value pair, where the key is the database name, and the value is an array of table records. Each table record is itself an object of key-value pairs, where the keys are the table columns, and the values are the corresponding values in the record.

The dataset is centered around the evidence, which represents one piece of historical evidence as extracted from one or more sources. An evidence must contain a reference to a place and a religion, and may reference a person and one or more time spans. Instances are used to connect evidences to places, persons, and religions; and additional metadata are stored individually in the instances. Time instances are connected to the evidence via a time group to allow for more than one time span per evidence. An evidence is connected via one or more source instances to one or more sources. Evidences can also be tagged with one or more tags via the tag_evidence table.

Places and persons have a type, which are defined in the place type and person type tables. Alternative names for places are stored in the name_var table with a reference to the respective language. For places and persons, references to URIs in other data collections (such as Syriaca.org or the Digital Atlas of the Roman Empire) are also stored, in the external_place_uri and external_person_uri tables. Rules for how to construct the URIs from the fragments stored in the last-mentioned tables are controlled via the uri_namespace and external_database tables.

Part of the project was to extract historical evidence from digitized texts, via annotations. Annotations are placed in a document, which is a digital version of a source. An annotation can be one of the four instance types, thereby referencing a place, person, religion, or time group. A reference to the annotation is stored in the instance, and evidences are constructed from annotations by connecting the respective instances in an evidence tuple.