Daniel Pitti (University of Virginia, United States)
Susan Perdue (University of Virginia, United States)
Short abstract:
The workshop will demonstrate SNAC (https://snaccooperative.org/) as a public research tool that facilitates access to descriptions of CPF entities and dispersed, related historical documents; and a demonstration of SNAC as an editing and maintenance platform. This should be of interest to curators and research users of cultural heritage (CH) resources.
Long abstract:
SNAC (https://snaccooperative.org/) is a cooperatively maintained resource for the description of corporate bodies, persons and families (CPF) interrelated to one another and to the historical resources that provide evidence of their lives and work. As a cooperatively maintained resource, SNAC serves interrelated functions that benefit both curators and research users of cultural heritage (CH) resources. For curators, SNAC serves as a platform for sharing labor-intensive identity resolution and description of shared CPF entities. It also serves as a platform for explicitly connecting dispersed historical resources held in repositories around the world through the CPF entities. SNAC thus aspires to be a vast global social-document network research tool. SNAC provides research users with two major benefits: integrated access to dispersed CH resources related to CPF entities and access to the social-professional-intellectual networks of the CPF entities documented in the resources. As a cooperative description platform, SNAC has focused on serving CH professionals, but it also aspires to expand the professional editorial community to include digital humanists interested in being partners in its development and maintenance: a CH-DH cooperative.
The intended audience for this workshop are persons involved in processing and describing CH holdings to facilitate access and understanding; persons providing reference services to researchers; research users of CH historical resources or with an interest in historical social networks; and digital humanists with an interest in both researching historical social networks and collaborating with CH professionals in documenting the global social-document network.
The workshop will demonstrate SNAC as a public research tool that facilitates access to descriptions of CPF entities and dispersed, related historical documents; and a demonstration of SNAC as an editing and maintenance platform.
The public research tool demonstration will cover the following:
The editing platform demonstration will briefly cover the following:
Twenty minutes will be allowed for questions and discussion at the end.