This 50-minute session will introduce newcomers to the basic principles of Linked Data. This session will serve as a report-back for Sarah Stanley’s recent trip to the Digital Resources and Methods Lab, where she took a Linked Data for the Humanities course. Sarah will discuss Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the concept of triples, which is the basis of linked data. Using this foundation, participants will learn about ontologies, which describes how different pieces of data can be linked together.

In order to further demonstrate the utility of linked data for humanists, Sarah will lead a participatory demonstration of SPARQL, which is the query language for RDF and Linked Data. Participants will work together to create SPARQL queries which will allow us to answer questions like: What works were authored by a given author and published by a given publishing house? What are all the works that were in published by a given publisher between two given dates?

This session will be designed so that audience members can participate even if they have not used query languages before. No technical experience is required to participate.