Amsterdam Diaries Time Machine - Connecting with LOD

Recently the Amsterdam Time Machine project launched the Amsterdam Diaries Time Machine (https://diaries.amsterdamtimemachine.nl/). This application unlocks six diaries of women living in Amsterdam during World War II and shows how they experienced daily life in the city. It shows how Linked Open Data works in practice and demonstrates how collaboration between institutions at the data level can lead to an application for the general public.

The selected diaries came from different heritage institutions in Amsterdam (Verzetsmuseum, Atria, Joods Historisch Museum). Students transcribed the already digitised diaries in Transkribus and annotated text snippets (persons, places, organisations, dates). Then we identified these in external datasets, such as Wikidata and AdamLink and stored the enriched annotations through a Web Annotation model. This Linked Open Data approach enabled us 1) to connect the diaries with each other, 2) to easily visualize locations mentioned in the diaries on a map of Amsterdam, thus integrating personal stories with larger historical events that are described in other (external) datasets, and users 3) to search on entity level in different texts. For the occasion we also highlighted a frequent mentioned theme in daily life in WWII (food: eating & drinking). The diaries are presented in a visual context with photographs of Amsterdam during World War II, obtained from the Amsterdam City image database with IIIF.

The website of the Amsterdam Diaries Time Machine was developed by Total Design (https://www.totaldesign.com/) with financial aid of the Mondriaan Fonds for the Amsterdam Time Machine, a research project of the University of Amsterdam. The infrastructure developed for the Amsterdam Diaries is also suitable to unlock various other digital heritage sources through Linked Open Data.