SwissBritNet: Exploring Swiss-British Relations in Early Modern Times through an RDF-star-based Knowledge Graph

The SwissBritNet project aims to establish a comprehensive database of 17th- and 18th-century documents, presenting the data through an innovative and user-friendly platform. This database will empower students, scholars, and a broader audience to delve into Swiss-British relations during the early modern period, contributing to a deeper understanding of the networks of knowledge that shaped this era. In the dynamic field of early modern transnational relations, our project aligns with digital humanities initiatives, leveraging large-scale data collection, visualization, and analysis to enrich our understanding of the Republic of Letters.

Joining the global research community, SwissBritNet focuses on the often-overlooked Swiss-British relations, challenging the perception that continental anglophilia and British enthusiasm for Switzerland emerged only in the late 18th century. We illuminate a long and intricate history, revealing that between 1600 and 1780, individuals ranging from students and scholars to translators, clerics, aristocrats, and diplomats engaged in correspondence and travel between Switzerland and the British Isles. These interactions, crucial for research, the advancement of the Protestant cause, career development, and friendship formation, are embedded in thousands of unpublished manuscripts such as letters and friendship albums and obscure print items that require digitization, transcription, and online searchability.

Building on existing database projects and fostering collaboration with similar repositories, we will develop advanced search options, visualization tools, and linked open data solutions. Our search options will permit complex network analysis, and case studies will ensure research-driven data modeling and the development of intelligent queries, aiming to “create a historical knowledge graph for the field, capable of transforming our current understanding of the processes of transnational … exchange central to the European experience” (Hotson, Wallnig 2019: 282). The project core is the case study of two ego networks, the correspondences of Johann Jacob Frey (1606–1636) and Caspar Wettstein (1695–1760) as well as two genres, travel writing and devotional literature. Exemplary in-depth research on these case studies will ensure that the data is modeled to accommodate complex research questions, mindful of the ‘betweenness’ of marginal facilitators of the network, including women. Our research questions:

● What is the nature and intensity of Swiss-British relations between 1600 and 1780?

● How do these relations develop, and who are the most important players and most resonant transnational stories?

● How does sustained attention to the Swiss contribution change our perception of the ‘Republic of Letters’?

SwissBritNet will offer:

● edited and searchable texts of 1300-plus hitherto unpublished documents from Swiss and British libraries and the metadata for thousands more print and manuscript items

● linked-data solutions that enable collaborations with existing databases without compromising their integrity. We will connect our repository to cataloging portals such as Early Modern Letters Online (EMLO) ¹ and existing related digital editions repositories such as Bernoulli-Euler Online (BEOL), ² and especially hallerNet, ³ storing XML/TEI transcripts and part of the catalog entries on their platform.

● search options based on rich metadata and combining text and object information to explore complex interpersonal, institutional, and intellectual relationships. For example, persons will be searchable as the author, recipient, subject, translator, or book owner and locations as birthplace, subject travel destination, or place of writing.

● web-based interactive visualizations of data with a timeline

SwissBritNet, to a large extent, will follow approaches proposed by Hyvönen et al. (2022) in developing generic ontologies based on Dublin Core, ⁴ and CIDOC-CRM ⁵ to represent the historical correspondence as RDF statements. It will then go beyond the standard RDF to attach metadata about the sources of knowledge to the edges of the graph using the RDF-star technology. ⁶ In addition to correspondence, a few travel journals will also be integrated into SwissBritNet, which will be modeled using the RDF-star-based ontology suggested by Ammann et al. (2023). In this way, we ensure that the metadata-oriented nature of travel reports is fully captured and represented in the knowledge graph, allowing for sophisticated queries on these data using SPARQL-star. The already in-progress transcriptions of the documents will be modeled using the defined ontologies, and the consistency of the data and ontologies will be verified using SHACL shapes. ⁷ We will use the NLP pipeline suggested by Alassi (2023) for an ontology-driven extraction of information from the transcriptions to enrich our knowledge graph with resources representing named entities found in the texts in different languages (German and English) as well as any relation expressed in the texts between these names entities. The pipeline thus will accomplish a task that would manually be very labor intensive. We will verify the pipeline results using our SHACL shapes and our team experts before integration in the database to ensure the accuracy of the automatically generated graph components.

The verified data will be stored in GraphDB ⁸ triplestore that supports RDF-star and SPARQL-star and will be accessible and queriable through a RESTful API. We will present the data in a web-based platform offering user-friendly analysis tools to query the knowledge graph, hiding the complexity of the data structure from non-expert users. The platform will offer full-text searches, category searches, graph-based network searches, or any combination thereof. We will integrate interactive visualizations of the correspondence graph (Alassi et al. 2020) and map visualization of travel routes to this platform. This will enable users to study data distribution and relations between network resources before studying the data in detail.

The SwissBritNet will thus enable complex inquiries into the networked structure of the Republic of Letters by providing an interoperable, multi-modal database that connects to and shares data with other platforms. It will present travel journals in a sophisticated yet efficient and comprehensive form. Employing the linked open data principles, we will make our data and ontologies reusable and interoperable by other projects, and every atom of knowledge in our knowledge graph will be machine-readable and fully queriable. For data access longevity, compatibility with the DaSCH ⁹ platform will be ensured. We are committed to an open access policy and sustainability according to the FAIR principles so that data and software will be freely and reliably accessible to the scientific community.