Robust information and (meta-)data management in historiography

When working with historical data, one of the issues that surprised me most was the apparent indistrinction, if not complete neglection, regarding best practices in robust information and (meta-)data management within the field of historiography.

There were easily found cases where serveral historiographers analyzed the life story of a historic person, and each of them started elaborating his own data from scratch; which included the collection of data from orginial sources, transcriptions, digitalization and coding of data. I shall not go into the details of the further implications for such a work. In many cases, archives would not send the sources out (books, maps and similar), and often they rejected to digitalize, i.e. scan them, or to allow the researcher to take photos or scans of those books; not to speak about the lack of availability of LOD in historiographic research. Resuming, the research starts from the beginning, often unaware of other historiographer's works.

As such, historiography spends an enourmes amount of effort in time and money which is completly innecessary.

Further, we can found eternal reviews on one or the other biographers' or historiographers' findings, winning mostly through convincing argumentation, adorned with selected quotations of primary sources. In order to know, if their introduction of primary sources is suffiecient and adequate, yes, even in order to know if these sources are cited correctly, it is often necessary to get back to the original source and follow all steps over again. Some of those sources might be lost in the process, and again, it takes a lot of time to localize a specific line in a whole text corpus. In this sense, most of historiographic are developed at the level of the Early Medieval Bible hermeneutics.

Historiography lacks traceability in its research process.

Whereas in business management, legal science, medicine and many other fields, researches work with coding standards, consulting databases, general libraries and content management systems (CRM) that allow data to be created once and reused many times. In archivistic and historiography we are still in the beginning for such an approach to data use.

Todays' archivistic is still far from robuts information management.

First approaches into a new way of looking into data and using it by systematically work throughout the whole historiographic process have already undertaken by a few researchers in historiography.

The software Spindle, which was developed for the purpose of the research Principles of Liberty, is an intend to improve this effort in the direction towards an optimal information and (meta-)data management in historiography.