Quick update

I’ve finished working on The Power of Petitioning, and the shutdown is giving me plenty of time to work on By The Sword Linked, so here’s a quick summary of where I am and where I’m going.

The biggest news is that there are now wiki pages for 1,238 authors who weren’t alive during the civil wars (see Authors category for a full list). Of these, 1,049 are linked to Wikidata IDs. About 25% of authors imported so far are women. Not ideal but it may be a fairly accurate reflection of who has publications and theses relevant to the British Civil Wars.

With enough authors in place, I’ve been able to import more publications and theses. For example:

  • Midland History is a journal with links to about 60 articles. This is all of the articles that I think are relevant to the civil wars. Wikidata seems to have complete coverage of this journal up to 2017, which made the imports easier.
  • Helion Century of the Soldier is a series of monographs and edited collections with links to each volume that covers the civil wars. The volume pages have links to the publisher’s website.
  • Theses category lists a small selection of theses, mostly recent and mostly by women, which is encouraging for the future.
  • Open access category is a quick way to find sources that are free to view online, with subcategories for books, articles and theses.

Now that I’ve tested every type of entity at a big enough scale, I think I’ve finally finalised the data structures, although I can’t rule out minor changes if I come across something that needs fixing.

The current situation hasn’t derailed this project but it has changed my priorities for the future. The news that The National Archives of the UK are closed until further notice makes it especially important to share transcripts of Public Records that I already have copies of. Before I do that, I need to import more people and places to make it easier to link sources to subjects. I expect to be doing that for most of April. Then from May onwards I’ll try to share as much material as I can from SP 28. This will also demonstrate the value of the Open Government Licence. In between doing all that, I might write some more detailed blog posts about how I imported data for authors and publications.