Modelling Historical Travelling in Wikidata: The Database “Digital Travelogues. Saxony in Travelogues of the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Times”

The paper uses an example from the field of regional historical research to show how datasets can be transferred from proprietary database applications to the open structures of the Wikiverse, where they can be collaboratively edited, curated and reused. The case study examines a bibliography of travel reports on Saxony from the late Middle Ages and the early modern period, which was first published as a journal article in print, then converted into a closed Microsoft Access database, and finally exported semi-automatically to Wikidata. The discussion covers issues of data modelling and reconciliation as well as technical implementation and the creation of digital research applications based on the dataset in Wikidata.