Daniel Pitti
Associate Director, Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities
University of Virginia
Brian Tingle
Technical Lead, Access & Publishing, California Digital Library
University of California
Social Networks and Archival Context (SNAC [2010- ]), currently a research project, is in the early stages of being transformed into an international archival description cooperative hosted by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. The long-term technological objective for the Cooperative is a platform that will support a continuously expanding, curated corpus of reliable biographical descriptions of people linked to and providing contextual understanding of the historical records that function as primary evidence for understanding their lives and work. In the research phase, SNAC has demonstrated that the descriptions of people embedded in archival descriptions of historical records can be extracted and assembled into a social-document network. This network provides the foundation for a History Research Tool that provides integrated access to dispersed historical resources as well as the social and historical context for understanding and interpreting the resources. The Cooperative will be responsible for the ongoing expansion and curation of the assembled SNAC social-document data and the ongoing development of the History Research Tool.
http://socialarchive.iath.virginia.edu/
Presentation (Pitti)
Presentation (Tingle)