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International audience; The german biography portal “Deutsche Biographie” is a joint effort of the Historical Commission at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the Bavarian State Library and supported by cultural heritage institutions to develop a historical and biographical information system for the German-speaking world. It includes digital full texts of more than 48.000 articles about persons and families of two biographical dictionaries and indices from associated institutions. We will describe our objectives in adopting state-of-the-art methods in Digital Humanities (DH): metadata modeling, text-encoding, identifying individuals and places in authority files and aggregating further biographical information from freely available, persistent, scientific and source-based websites and databases. The portal offers an entry point for historical biographical research by providing programmable web services to foster current approaches in DH like linked open data/semantic web, historical network research. computational linguistics. The potential of it lies in its coordinated biographical data management and integration. The common database is gradually enlarged in a collaborative and modular manner together with partners in Germany and Europe. We will discuss on how the collection information can be curated in order to serve and facilitate future research trends.

International audience; The Karjala database contains digitized demographic data of the parish registers from the regions ceded to the Soviet Union in 1944. The objectives of the digitization project have been to promote access to digitized records for scientific research and genealogy as well as encouraging research on the people of the ceded Karelia region. The main sources for the database have been catechetical lists, lists of children, and registers of vital statistics (registers of births, marriages, migrations and deaths) that are available in Digital Archives of the National Archives of Finland from the period of 1681 – 1949. The data in the database amounts to about 10.3 million entries, but only data older than 100 years is published openly on the Internet. According to decisions by the Finnish data protection authorities, the Personal Data Act is applied to personal registers less than 100 years old. The digitization process is still going on; it has been calculated that there are 1.2 million entries still to be processed. The database is available to users via https://katiha.mamk.fi/. At present, there are about 6.5 million file entries available on the Internet, each presenting data about one individual, e.g. names, the date of birth and death, the cause of death, age, gender, marital status, occupation, residence, migration, the parish. The Karjala database can be exploited for diverse research purposes; it improves access to the church records that are sometimes very difficult to read. Information in the database can be utilized for historical research, medical genetics, social sciences, and family and onomastics. The database is can be utilized for clarifying family structures, migratory patterns or child mortality. The database also offers excellent opportunities for interdisciplinary research. Our presentation will describe the digitization process management of old, handwritten documents that consist of non-structured data from a historical period that contains varied linguistic material: several languages from a historical period where nations, states and languages were still evolving, different calendars and spelling rules etc. We will also introduce our plans to use text recognition technology so that the handwritten documents such as the Karjala database will be incorporated into the international READ project network http://read.transkribus.eu/network/. We will also discuss the challenges encountered in this type of heterogeneous data and the possibilities for more defined and structured data management that could enable the automated use of the database. We will also include in our presentation a description of the evolution of the different phases of the database, emphasizing the evolution of the database and its linkage with internet technologies e.g. how they have either hindered or enabled the digitization project.

Humanities have convincingly argued that they need transnational research opportunities and through the digital transformation of their disciplines also have the means to proceed with it on an up to now unknown scale. The digital transformation of research and its resources means that many of the artifacts, documents, materials, etc. that interest humanities research can now be combined in new and innovative ways. Due to the digital transformations, (big) data and information have become central to the study of culture and society. Humanities research infrastructures manage, organise and distribute this kind of information and many more data objects as they becomes relevant for social and cultural research. International audience

La conservation, l’étude et la numérisation des livres ont été avant tout justifiées par un besoin social ou individuel de lecture : utilitaire, pour obtenir un diplôme et avoir un métier, pour diffuser des idées, besoin hédoniste issu du plaisir de la lecture. Actuellement la constitution des corpus et la numérisation de collections pourraient remplacer les livres par les « données », dont la consultation mettrait en danger un rapport au texte qui était avant tout « linéaire ». Des exemples pris dans les fonds de la bibliothèque du Mans ou personnels permettent d’alimenter le débat autour de ce qui apparaît comme une déqualification de la lecture, au profit de résultats obtenus grâce à un outillage plus ou moins bien maîtrisé par l’humain. Once upon a time, the preservation, the study, and the digitization of books were primarily justified by utilitarian needs: to obtain a qualification, or to hold down a job — or to share ideas, or to satisfy a hedonistic need derived from the pleasure of reading. Nowadays the building of corpora and the digitization of collections could replace books by « data », the consultation of which threatens a close engagement with the linearity of text. I will comment on examples chosen from the library of Le Mans, and from my own collection, to question this apparent under valuing of reading in favour of results derived by means of tools only partly under human control. International audience

This article tackles the issue of integrating heterogeneous archival sources in one single data repository, namely the EHRI portal, whose aim is to support Holocaust research by providing online access to information about dispersed sources relating to the Holocaust (http://portal.ehri-project.eu). In this case, the problem at hand is to combine data coming from a network of archives in order to create an interoperable data space which can be used to search for, retrieve and disseminate content in the context of archival-based research. The central aspect of the work described in this paper is the assessment of the role of the Encoded Archival Description (EAD) standard as the basis for achieving the tasks described above. We have worked out how we could develop a real strategy of defining specific customization of EAD that could be used at various stages of the process of integrating heterogeneous sources. We have developed a methodology based on a specification and customization method inspired from the extensive experience of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) community. In the TEI framework, one has the possibility to model specific subsets or extensions of the TEI guidelines while maintaining both the technical (XML schemas) and editorial (documentation) content within a single framework. This work has led us quite far in anticipating that the method we have developed may be of a wider interest within similar environments, but also, as we believe, for the future maintenance of the EAD standard. Special thanks to Annelies van Nispen (NIOD) and Hector Martinez Alonso (ALMAnaCH) for their help, and to Lou Burnard (TEI) for his wise comments International audience