Modeling Pre-Modern Ambiguities: Case Studies from Eastern Europe 

From the mid-14th century, the Ruthenian principality of Halych-Volhynia was divided between the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. This marked the beginning of a process of transformation and incorporation that led, in 1434, to the creation of the Voivodeship Ruthenia for the Polish part in 1434. Sven Jaros examined this process in his PhD thesis »Iterationen im Grenzraum. Akteure und Felder multikonfessioneller Herrschaftsaushandlung in Kronruthenien (1340-1434)«. The VAMOD project’s goal is to develop best practices for data ingest by making the research data from this work (approx. 800 documents with approx. 1600 locations and 5000 personal names) available on the open data graph database FactGrid in accordance with the FAIR-principles and linking it with standard data. This raises the question of how to depict ambivalent and heterogenous premodern historical realities in a digital environment that demands unambiguousness and linkability with other projects. To this end, our project aims to develop guidelines for future ventures of a similar kind and thus bring long-overlooked historical expertise into the semantic web. 

The project was developed in cooperation with Dr. Sven Jaros, Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg, Eastern European History / Aleksander Brückner Center for Polish Studies.

Cooperations with the Polish Academy of Sciences in Kraków, the Friedrich-Schiller-University in Jena and the German National Library are planned. 

You can find our FactGrid-project page here: FactGrid:VAMOD – FactGrid.