Providing Computational Access to Records of American Capital Punishment
This talk will overview a two-year project to digitize and expose data from the most complete collection on American executions using the open architectures of Hyrax and Arclight. We’ll show how connecting data to digital source material provides important context for executions with limited or conflicting documentation, and allows for significant additions to the known set of executions that alters the overall makeup of the collection. This talk will discuss the challenges of presenting this material transparently and empathetically, and show how Linked Data can actually work to undermine these goals. Finally, we’ll discuss how this project will support computational access to all archival materials at our repository, and overview the ongoing challenges we face implementing and maintaining complex tools at a mid-size institution.
