EM Dates is an early modern calendar conversion service for the sixteenth- to eighteenth-century under development by the Cultures of Knowledge project at Oxford University. It is the second of what will eventually become three Linked Open Data resources also comprising EM Places and EM People built on a shared humanities infrastructure platform in collaboration with the Humanities Cluster of the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) in Amsterdam.
You can read an overview of EM Dates in the 'Dates' chapter of Hotson & Wallnig (eds.) Reassembling the Republic of Letters in the Digital Age: Standards, Systems, Scholarship (Göttingen, 2019).
EM Dates is designed to provide a locale and period aware resource for individual and bulk early modern date conversions. To accomplish this, EM Dates draws on data collected in EM Places for the date(s) at which a historical place entity (e.g. the 'Republic of Venice') transitioned from one calendrical system to another (e.g. Julian to Gregorian). Given an ISO 8601 formatted date and an gazetteer authority reference to either a known historical place entity (in EM Places) or to a name (e.g. in GeoNames) associated with a known place entity in EM Places, it will infer the appropriate calendar and offer to make the suggested date conversion. In addition, it provides support for parsing early modern dates expessed in Roman nomenclature into ISO 8601.
The resource will offer a web form for converting single dates as well as bulk conversion facility for uploading metadata on a series of dates and locations in a tabular file format (Excel, CSV), and receiving back from the application, also in tabular format, the converted dates alongside the initial inputs. As part of this workflow, EM Dates will provide an online review stage, where a user can examine EM Dates' inferred confidence level for each suggested conversion. The review stage will provide an opportunity for a user to revise and re-process (e.g. incomplete) input data and a means to override the suggested conversion before final export.
Access to the tool for individual and bulk conversions will also be provided via an open Timbuctoo GraphQL API. Because EM Dates maintains an internal list of known-correct Roman date variants to normalised ISO 8601 transformations, adding an OpenRefine endpoint for reconciliation and/or sharing this data with the GODOT calendar gazetteer is also under active consideration.
November 2019: Began work on a limited demo w/single & bulk date parsing and conversion for Q1 2020.
February 2019: Conversion API and Roman parser available for testing via Docker.
November 2018: Rewrite of conversion algorithms on the basis of Rheingold & Derschowitz
October 2018: Draft Roman date parser (i.e. Julian or Gregorian dates in Roman nomenclature)
August 2018: Draft high-level description of feature set; initial release of minimal viable (standalone) API
We are keen to get your comments and feedback on EM Dates. Please get in touch by contacting Arno Bosse (Digital Project Manager, Cultures of Knowledge) by email arno.bosse@history.ox.ac.uk via @kintopp on Twitter or by creating a new GitHub issue in the repository with your comment/question.
Arno Bosse (Oxford - Project Management), Howard Hotson (Oxford - Director), Graham Klyne (Oxford – Data Modelling), Miranda Lewis (Oxford - Editor), Martijn Maas (Huygens – Systems Development), Glauco Mantegari (Design Consultant), Jauco Noordzij (Huygens – Systems Development), Marnix van Berchum (Huygens - Project Management), Mat Wilcoxson (Oxford – Systems Development).
EM Places, EM People, and EM Dates were funded in 2017-2019 by a grant to the University of Oxford from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.