This repository and the intellectual work (aka data) it contains are published under a CC-BY-SA license (more information in the deed).
In brief, this means that you are allowed to freely use and adapt its contents in your own work as long as you attribute the original authors appropriately and share it as part of the Creative Commons as well.
This is a development repository for collaboratively designing and integrating the research guides from NIOD into the Datahub. The core of the approach is to treat the research guides as data, which means structuring them and the texts they contain as much as possible for parsing, automatic ingestion into and linking with the Datahub and its front-end applications.
(not updated automatically -- to generate the directory tree run
(echo "\`\`\`"; echo "$(tree --charset=ascii niveau*)"; echo "\`\`\`") > directory_tree.md)
The research guides as produced by NIOD are organised in a hierarchy of 3 levels. The top level of the hierarchy, level 1, consists of general texts about writing provenance reports, the landscape of heritage institutions and other introductory materials. Due to their general nature, there are only few such documents, they contain mainly unstructured text and are thus not treated as data. This means that they are not included in the work done in this repository.
The second tier of the hierarchy is made up of descriptions of broad topics, major actors and concepts in the colonial context, such as the Dutch colonial army. Guides on this level will be a main point of entry into the Datahub and provide context. There will be several dozens of such guides and they are thus treated as data, an example translation into YAML can be found in Leger_en_Marine.yaml.
Finally, on the third level, there is additional information about specific entities, actors and concepts related to and active in the colonial context. These guides are data already from their origin, as there can be arbitrarily many, and they should be treated as such, i.e. live next to/in the data in the Datahub. An example of the Kunsthandel van Lier guide translated into YAML is Kunsthandel_van_Lier.yam;l.
YAML (short for YAML Ain't Markup Language) is a human-readable data format that defines basic data types and containers and allows to construct more complex data constructions with those. Markdown is a markup [sic!] language
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