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LINCS develops infrastructure and tools so scholars and students of the humanities can create and access Linked Open Data (LOD). The promise and potential of LOD is at the heart of LINCS.

While the term data is not commonly used to describe the scholarly output of humanities researchers, many humanities researchers produce data. Humanities data can take many forms, such as:

  • Image files (e.g., pictures, paintings, photographs)
  • Text files (e.g., poems, manuscripts, letters, newspapers, journals, short stories, social media posts)
  • Maps and geospatial coordinates
  • Audio recordings (e.g., music, oral histories)
  • Metadata files

These items can all be transformed into standard formats that both humans and computers can read. When data is made openly available on the web, scholars—and everyone!—can discover data, link to data, and advance humanities scholarship.

When research materials are converted into LOD, anyone can:

  • Discover unexpected connections and influences among creative works, people, places, events, and organizations

What are the social connections among people and networks that created the artwork and literature in these fin-de-siècle magazines?

  • Ask new questions by searching across multiple diverse datasets

Who (demographic data) lived on these streets (location data) in early modern London?

  • Query the data using multiple filters

Show me all women authors who were published by independent presses and whose fathers were members of the clergy.

  • Reveal relationships by viewing data graphically as a timeline, word cloud, network, or chart