ISNI: creating identifiers for women without them

In this guest blog, Catherine Senior & Pamela Johnson from the British Library’s Authority Control team introduce work on creating ISNIs (International Standard Name Identifiers) for women we’ve encountered during the Beyond Notability Project.

As members of the British Library Collections Authority Control team, the brief we were given was to create or amend ISNI records for approximately 600 women, to support the AHRC-funded ‘Beyond Notability’ project. These women – educated, knowledgeable, widely-read and sometimes widely travelled – were, in many cases, not given much recognition in their own lifetime.

The period which the project covers is roughly 1870-1950. It delves into the histories of women who were active in archaeology, history and heritage. Having created an ISNI record for each of them, or upgrading and adding to their record if they already had one on the database, we were able to supply an URL which will link to other data.

We describe our experiences of this piece of work below.

Catherine: I have found the project interesting, particularly as I am fascinated by nineteenth century history – most of identities I covered were from the late 19th century and early 20th. The women were highly educated, many having studied at University, yet the papers they produced were often read out at meetings by husbands or fathers – many were not allowed to use their own voice – which seems very alien to us. Quite a few of the women had lived abroad for part of their lives, involved mainly in archaeology, so they had obviously lived full and interesting lives at a time when you would expect women’s lives to be much more narrowly focused on the family.

One of the identities I looked at was simply described as “lady cataloguer” – the title of her paper had lived on, but not her name. I used prior knowledge of how I had tackled creating similar personal names, as a specialist cataloguer librarian, to decide how to cite the identity. It was fascinating to discover just how many women were involved in archaeology during this time period. It feels as though we have played a small part in unearthing some hidden history.

Pamela: Like my colleague Catherine, I found that some of the women did not read out their own papers. For example, Ellen K. Ware, also known as Mrs. Henry Ware, and when younger, as Ellen King Goodwin. In June 1886, Ellen Ware was elected an Honorary Member of the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne. She was also a member of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society. At meetings of both these societies on different dates, papers that Ellen had written were read out on her behalf – on one occasion by a Dr. Hodgkin and on an earlier occasion by her father Bishop Goodwin. What we don’t know is – why? Why did Ellen not present her own papers? Was she not permitted, or did she not have the confidence to stand up in front of the assembled group, or was there some other reason? Fascinating, intriguing, and quite annoying for me as a 21st Century woman!

On now to Ethel Mary Colman from Norwich, who was vice president of the British Association in 1935, and even more excitingly, Lord Mayor of Norwich in 1923 – 24. She was not only the first woman to be Lord Mayor of Norwich, but the first woman to be a Lord Mayor of a UK city. I wondered, as I gathered Ethel’s facts together, what it must have felt like to achieve that.

And finally a quick look at Queen Victoria. As there was a considerable amount of existing metadata associated with her, I needed to add specific fields to tie the queen to the Beyond Notability project. I read on Queen Victoria’s Beyond Notability wikibase entry that she exhibited a portrait of Mary Queen of Scots at a meeting of the Society of Antiquaries in London; on another occasion she exhibited a Coronation spoon (topical!); was she there, did she attend the meeting, or did she just lend the exhibits?

The things we most enjoyed about the project were learning about the women and what interested them; their achievements and the limitations seemingly imposed upon them, and the chance to contribute to a fascinating project. We are both so happy that ISNI is a highly valued and useful identifier that plays a part in research. The ISNI data we created can be seen via the ISNI ID property on the Beyond Notability wikibase.

Catherine Senior & Pamela Johnson

On Friends and Friendships

By Katherine, Amara, and James (Project Investigators)

Constructing an ontology around relations between people is (relatively) straightforward when those relations are formal or familial: person X was taught by person Y, person A shared a house with person B, person P was the daughter of person Q. Where it gets difficult is when those relations are not familial, are less tangible, and we feel those relations are both significant and not unambiguously captured in our sources: for example, when two or more people appear to have been friends and that friendship appears to have been important to their lives.

Wikidata does not have a property for friendship, and as a project team we decided – after lengthy discussion and disagreement – that creating a property for friendship was unwise, because ‘friend’ is highly ambiguous. For example, ‘friends’ is used in ‘friends, Romans, countrymen’ to hail a group of people who are not necessarily friends, but rather to encourage those people to treat the speaker – or the institution they represent – as if friends. Similarly, the expression ‘friends of the British Museum’ is an organisational usage that describes a loose group of patrons, donors, and/or sponsors who are not necessarily ‘friends’ with the organisation but are rather well-wishers and/or supporters.

Wikidata – which Beyond Notability treats as a guide, though something short of a model – gets around this issue with the ‘significant person’ property, defined as ‘person linked to the item in any possible way’. That is, the property is used to define a range of relations that are significant to the subject: for example, between pi and William Jones (the latter named the former), Albrecht Dürer and Willibald Pirckheimer (the pair were noted correspondents), Hispano-Suiza and Marc Birkigt (the latter founded the former), 284 AD and Diocletian (the latter became Roman Emperor in 284 AD), Sarah Bernhardt and Betty Callish (they were friends).

For us, adopting this approach would have three disadvantages. First, it is non-specific, and a key rationale for creating our own knowledge base – rather than simply augmenting Wikidata – is to allow us to drill into the specificity of relations that our domain demands. Second, it is implemented in Wikidata without the requirement for evidence (to get technical, there is no property constraint for P3342 that requires a valid reference). Third, and more philosophical, is the emphasis on ‘notability’ (both of the subjects involved and of the relationships between those subjects), and the positional work that implies – notability thresholds depend on whosenotability counts and which relationships are considered to be significant. In a project seeking explicitly (it is in the title!) to go beyond notability, we have already resolved to always to make explicit that we are ascribing to people aspects of identity and self-image perceived by us in our interpretation of our sources. In turn, constructing our own notability thresholds for things like friendships between people – for, per Homosaurus “Connections based on affection and trust between two or more people” (and the various cascading private and public specificities thereof) – struck us, after much debate, as unwise.

So, what ascriptions or expressions of connections of this ambiguous kind are we encountering in our sources?

We know that Maria Millington Lathbury and Jane Harrison lived for some time at the same address – Chenies Street Chambers, a women’s residence in London. They were interviewed together in Pall Mall Gazette about lecturing work, and Harrison was described by Lathbury’s daughter in a published memoir as one of the “friends” who sought to help her establish her career as a freelance lecturer.

We know that Lucy Toulmin Smith wrote an obituary for Mary Kingsley, and Kingsley’s biographer, Stephen Gwynn, described her in his 1932 work as a “friend”.

We know that Agnes Conway dedicated her 1917 book to Jane Harrison describing her (in Latin) as a “beloved teacher” (“magistra dilecta”); and that Conway’s diaries reveal Jane Harrison was a hugely influential mentor for her for many years after she left Newnham College. For Amara, who has extensively researched Conway’s diaries, this amounts to friendship.

And we know that Anna Anderson Morton and Mary Brodrick ran a business together, travelled together, and were likely to have shared an address for part of their lives. Morton also arranged public appearances for Brodrick, announcements for which appeared in contemporary newspapers.

Based on our discussions, ontological observations, and analysis of evidence, our solution – for now – is to create the property ‘has personal connection to’. We plan to use this property to capture instances where evidence exists of non-familial and personal connections between people (beyond merely using the words such as ‘friend’ in a formal manner) and that is a more modest way of asserting connections between people that evoking ‘friendship’. For example, we have used this property to capture the personal connection between Ethel Henrietta Rudkin and Margaret Alice Murray as evidenced by Murray writing a foreword to a book written by Rudkin and by Murray having been noted as encouraging Rudkin’s work. This usage is then similar to Wikidata’s usage of ‘significant person’ in that its use is likely to be sparing – we don’t anticipate that every women in our knowledge base will have a ‘personal connection’ statement associated with them. However, it differs in placing an emphasis on the personal, and in not picking out ‘significant’ relations but rather trying to amplify the significance of other statements that suggest personal connections – in making ‘personal’ the evidence that links flatmates, colleagues in an excavation, or committee members.

Getting started with wikibase.cloud for heritage projects

By James Baker (Co-Investigator)

The Beyond Notability Knowledge Base stores biographical information about women’s work in archaeology, history, and heritage in Britain between 1870 and 1950, information gathered during the course of our AHRC-funded research. We create information in the form of semantic triples, machine and human reading statements that describe the relationship between two things: the Miss Hemming lived in Uxbridge, that Louisa Elizabeth Deane was a donor to the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1887, that Harriet Loyd Lindsay destroyed the Yew Down barrow in 1906.

Wikidata, which celebrates its 10th birthday this Autumn, is the pre-eminent knowledge base for machine readable linked data describing the relationship between people and things. Whilst we are adding and enriching wikidata, and whilst we use it as a source of information we choose not to duplicate, we maintain our research on a separate knowledge base because we need to describe relationships that are too particular to us to represent on Wikidata, and because we diverge from the Wikidata community in how some concepts – such as gender expression – should be described.

If you visually compare our knowledge base with Wikidata you’ll notice that they look remarkably similar. This is because they use the same underlaying software – Wikibase – to create, maintain, manage, and query semantic triples. Since June this year, our Beyond Notability Wikibase instance has been hosted by Wikimedia Deutschland via their wikibase.cloud service. wikibase.cloud enables people who want to run a Wikibase but don’t have the (technical or financial) capacity to run their own instance, to create a Wikibase on a shared hosting platform with minimal configuration.

This post describes how to get started, key points to consider, and some basic things to do to make your work with wikibase.cloud easier.

Create an Instance

At the time of writing, wikibase.cloud is in a closed beta, which means they are not accepting account requests. However, you can sign up for early access and join community mailing list.

Once you have a login, you can create a new wiki by choosing a site name, deciding a prefix to .wikibase.cloud, and then creating your wiki. From there you have a few important configuration options:

  • to set a site logo;
  • to edit your site skin from three options (ours is “Vector”);
  • to select whether users of your Wikibase can create accounts and edit straight away, or require your approval (we have the latter);
  • whether or not to map your properties to those on Wikidata (we don’t, for reasons).

Editing pages

Editing a page – e.g. a landing page or a list of queries – on your wikibase.cloud instance is the same as editing a page on Wikipedia in that both use the same syntax: so, ==HEADING== for a heading, * for a bullet, [http://www.foo.bar My Website] for a link, etc.

If you aren’t sure where to start, hit the View source link on another Wikibase – like ours! – borrow the code, and start playing around. Anything you get wrong can be reverted via the View history tab, so little can really go wrong.

Note that to make a new page, there is no new page button of the kind you might be used to on WordPress or similar sites. To create a new page you need to manually enter the URL you want for your new page – such as https://beyond-notability.wikibase.cloud/wiki/Project:MyNewPage – in your browser, and then hit the create this page button to create the page from scratch.

Give your collaborators edit access

Once you are logged into your Wikibase, you will see a Special pages link on the left-side tower. Here you can find lots of useful pages for maintaining your site. One is the Create account page. Use this to add new people who will be collaborating with you on the Wikibase. Their user privileges can then be maintained via links in the Users and rights section of Special pages.

Create some linked data

Linked data is made up of Subject-Predicate-Object triples. These are both human and machine readable, meaning that – on our Wikibase – Margaret Sefton-Jones (Subject) was a member of (Predicate) the Royal Archaeological Institute (Object) is the same as bnwd:Q507 bnwdt:P67 bnwd:Q35.

Subjects and objects can change position (so, the Royal Archaeological Institute (Subject) has archives at (Predicate) the Society of Antiquaries of London (Object)). On Wikibase – as on Wikidata – both subjects and objects are represented by Q numbers and called “Items”. Predicates are the glue in the middle, represented by P numbers and called “Properties”. A Q-P-Q triple is known as a “Statement”.

To make a new item, hit New Item on the left-side tower. To make a new property, hit New Property on the left-side tower. Note that you must select a Data type for new properties otherwise they can’t be used to make statements. In most cases, the Data type will be Item, meaning that the property takes a Q number as its object. Common alternatives are Point in time or EDTF Date/Time (used for dates) and Monolingual text (used for adding free text).

Once you’ve made two items and a property you can make them into a statement. To do that works as follows:

  • Go to the item page for the item you want to be a subject, hit add statement, type in your P number (note that you can start typing the label for a P or Q in this box, but new items and properties won’t appear immediately because the search index for wikibase.cloud refreshes occasionally – usually daily at the slowest – to minimise resource use/impact) and click it.
  • Add your Q number in the next box and hit save to create your statement.
  • For more complex statements, create qualifiers to add detail to your statements and/or references to show where you got the information from. Qualifiers work the same way as statements so should feel intuitive (even if the logic takes a while to figure out – dig around our Wikibase and look at pages for individuals such as Margerie Venables Taylor if you need some guidance).

See who has been making what

Special pages are your friend. One really useful section is Recent changes and logs, which can give you a sense of what changes have been made recently, who has been doing what, and the new items that have been created in your Wikibase. If you are planning quality assurance work on your Wikibase, these logs are the place to start.

Use the ‘what links here’ pages

On the left side of each item and property page is the link What links here. This is an incredibly useful resource for navigating your emerging knowledge base, getting reports on usage of particular properties, and spotting quirks (and errors!) in the implementation of your data model.

For example, the What links here page for Margerie Venables Taylor gives you a quick sense of all the items – mostly for people – that link to her, in most cases because of her role in putting other women forward as Fellows of the Society of Antiquaries.

Equally, the What links here page for Oxford gives a sense of that place as hub for women’s intellectual communities in our period.

And the What links here page can also be useful for properties. For example, the What links here page for the property Archaeology Data Service person ID gives a list of all the people with ADS IDs in our Wikibase. That the result (at the time of writing) is 304 of 489 women in our Wikibase indicates the way our sources are revealing voices thus far unrecorded on other canonical services and persistent identifer infrastructures.

Write your first query

You can query your data with your ‘Query Service’, which can be accessed from the left pane. The Wikibase query services uses a query language called SPARQL, a standard query language for linked data. I have had a long and painful relationship with SPARQL – it isn’t all that easy to get your head around. Thankfully there are amazing resources out there to support query writing, notably Bob DuCharme’s book Learning SPARQL, and the Wikidata community maintains a range of example queries which give a sense of what is possible. Because a lot is possible.

We use SPARQL queries not only for analysing our data (for example, a query that returns people in our knowledge base sorted by the number of places they lived, including the number of cites/towns/villages in which they lived in), but also for auditing our data: for example, to return lists of people whose gender we’ve been unable to assign or people in the knowledge base listed alongside the external identifiers – e.g. Wikidata IDs – that we’ve been able to find. These connections with external IDs enable our linked data to link to other linked data, and are particularly powerful in enabling us – for example – to recover familial connections from Wikidata (where people have Wikidata IDs, and to the extent to which their familial connections are listed on Wikidata).

By building up our data, and connecting to external sources, we hope – in time – to be able to write more complex queries that support our research, including queries that return lists of women who undertook work within two years of having their first child, or those people who used their position in the field to bring women into the profession (a hacky version of which we’ve made a start on), and so on.

Join the community

When I run out of SPARQL talent (which happens often), Bob’s book and the examples of Wikidata often help me realise how to write the query I want. But if I’m totally stuck, I’ve also found that the Wikibase community is full of wonderful people willing to offer advice and guidance. Questions on Twitter are responded to. The Wikibase community on Telegram are a constant source of support and insight. And public tickets on Phabricator – where fixes and feature additions are proposed, prioritised, and tracked – help reveal which problems are your own, and which are shared; as well as being a space to log problems and suggest features. Like many such open source communities, the Wikibase community – as well as the wider Wikidata – are welcoming to beginners, full of expertise, and provide sustainability to the technology – software is, after all, about people. So, if you are thinking of using the Wikibase, join the community, dig around the community activity, don’t be afraid to ask the community and when you have insights to share or wish to contribute to the community.

License your data

People need to know how they can use your data. So make it easy for them. Good linked data enables data to be connected, queried across, and assembled from various sources. So clearly state your terms of use (data on Wikidata is available under the Creative Commons CC0 License) so that it can be used. Better still use your Wikibase to document your data so that people using it get a sense of the decisions you’ve made, the absences you are aware of, and the uses you think would be inappropriate or might cause harm. If you are not sure where to start, see Timnit Gebru, Jamie Morgenstern, Briana Vecchione, Jennifer Wortman Vaughan, Hanna Wallach, Hal Daumé III, and Kate Crawford’s wonderful ‘Datasheets for Datasets’ (2020) – you don’t need to follow every suggestion, but given that you will be creating machine readable data on your Wikibase, it is sure to provide inspiration.


Building the Beyond Notability Knowledge Base: 4 reasons why we chose Wikibase

By James Baker (Co-Investigator, Beyond Notability)

For all that people like to moan about the things that are wrong on Wikipedia (and there is much that is wrong on Wikipedia), it is the place people go to when they want to know something: together with the other sites run by the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia is the knowledge infrastructure of the web. Since 2010 cultural institutions have formally contributed to this ecosystem through Wikimedian-in-Residence programmes, typically resulting in digitised material appearing on Wikimeda Commons, the home for every media artefact you encounter when browsing Wikipedia.

More recently a number of those Wikimedian-in-Residence programmes have directed attention towards Wikidata, a multilingual knowledge graph that is a common source of open data used on Wikipedia. More significantly, every time you search Google and a little info box pops up on the right side of the screen containing useful – typically biographical – information, that is probably drawn from Wikidata. In turn a person without a Wikidata page is unlikely to get a box. And so if less than 20% of Wikipedia Biographies are about women, and if most Wikipedia biographies have a corresponding Wikidata page, then it follows that enriching Wikidata with otherwise neglected histories of women active in archaeology, history and heritage is something worth attention. Hence, our project.

Wikidata is a wiki (a collaboratively edited hypertext publication) whose technical infrastructure is based on a combination of the software MediaWiki and a set of knowledge graph MediaWiki extensions known as Wikibase, the workings of which are explained in the ’Introducing Our Database’ post. We have built the Beyond Notability Knowledge Base on the same infrastructure, using Wikibase-as-a-service, first via WbStack (with amazing support from Adam Shorland) and latterly via the Wikimedia Deutschland hosted Wikibase Cloud (with thanks to Mohammed Sadat). In this blog we list the Top 4 reasons why we took this approach.

1. Aligning Biographical Approaches

We can’t record the evidence we find directly onto Wikidata because many of the women we encounter in our research do not meet Wikidata’s ‘notability threshold’ – in some cases because evidence for their work in archaeology, history, and heritage is fragmentary, in other cases because the evidence needs to be assembled first to get over that threshold. Despite this, it wouldn’t make much sense for us to design from scratch a biographical database. And so we align our approach with Wikidata because, in part, it gives us an ontological platform to build on, a template for how to represent things like familial relations, office holding, and residences.

2. Beyond Notability as a Trusted Source

It made sense then to use the same technical infrastructures as Wikidata for our knowledge base. But whilst alignment is useful we cannot – as discussed in our recent blog ‘On Working with Gender – faithfully follow the Wikidata model for representing biographical information: the historically-specific circumstances in which women were working in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century are an awkward fit for a data model orientated around modern ways of being in the Global North: indeed, our project is a test of the capacities of data models like Wikidata to capture and represent these women’s lives. Given this need to diverge, given the choices we are making to diverge from Wikidata-as-canon, using the same software platform as Wikidata, the same visual and ontological aesthetic, supports our ambition for the Beyond Notability Knowledge Base to be regarded as a trusted source of biographical information. This is important because we think our work can make vital contributions to Wikidata. Take as an example Gwenllian Morgan, the subject of our previous blog. Prior to our project she was not listed on Wikidata as being a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries (the construction of which on Wikidata uses the’award received’ property). But now she is, with the amended Wikidata entry using Beyond Notability as the source of this information.

3. Querying Between Knowledge Bases

Recording Gwenllian Morgan as a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries (FSA) means that any queries that use Wikidata to return a list of FSAs will now include her, as one of the many people that link to the Wikidata item Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries (Q26196499). These queries can be made through the Wikidata Query Service, a SPARQL endpoint, “SPARQL” here meaning the query language used to interrogate graph databases. Building the Beyond Notability Knowledge Base on the same technologies as Wikidata means not only that we too have a SPARQL Query Service but also that both sets of data are organised using the same underlying principles, allowing us to more easily write queries that simultaneously interrogate both knowledge bases (and, indeed, any other knowledge bases that take a similar form).

We are already doing this kind of cross-querying to help our data entry. For example, we are using this..

PREFIX bnwd: <http://beyond-notability.wiki.opencura.com/entity/>
PREFIX bnwds: <http://beyond-notability.wiki.opencura.com/entity/statement/>
PREFIX bnwdv: <http://beyond-notability.wiki.opencura.com/value/>
PREFIX bnwdt: <http://beyond-notability.wiki.opencura.com/prop/direct/>
PREFIX bnp: <http://beyond-notability.wiki.opencura.com/prop/>
PREFIX bnps: <http://beyond-notability.wiki.opencura.com/prop/statement/>
PREFIX bnpq: <http://beyond-notability.wiki.opencura.com/prop/qualifier/>
PREFIX wdt: <http://www.wikidata.org/prop/direct/>
PREFIX wd:  <http://www.wikidata.org/entity/>

SELECT ?person ?personLabel ?item ?WD_DOB ?WD_DOD
WHERE {  
  ?person bnwdt:P16 ?isFSA . #select FSA
  FILTER NOT EXISTS {?person bnwdt:P4 bnwd:Q12 .} #filter out project team
  ?person bnwdt:P14 ?url . #look for wikidata URL on person page
  BIND(IRI(REPLACE(?url,"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/","http://www.wikidata.org/entity/")) as ?item ) 
  
  SERVICE <https://query.wikidata.org/sparql> {
        ?item wdt:P21 wd:Q6581072 . #select women
        OPTIONAL {?item wdt:P569 ?WD_DOB . } #recall date of birth
        OPTIONAL {?item wdt:P570 ?WD_DOD . } #recall data of death
      }
  
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "[AUTO_LANGUAGE],en-gb". } 
}

..query to return a list of all woman on our knowledge base with corresponding Wikidata entries and – where present – their dates of birth and death as listed on Wikidata (and yes, it could be a better query, I’m still learning). This is important to know, because we intend to use Wikidata to run queries that rely on this information – for example, return all the women who became Fellows of the Society of Antiquaries before they were 40 – for those women on Wikidata (for those who aren’t, we will record that data on our knowledge base).

As we develop more research orientated queries, using a comparable infrastructure to Wikidata gives us more example queries to draw on for inspiration and guidance. One such query is helping to develop our understanding of the interpersonal connections that women relied on to get recognition for their work, and who were key allies for women in the period. Other queries we are starting to imagine and this is helping shape the data we include in the Beyond Notability Knowledge Base. For example, in order to successfully run a queries that returns a list of all women in our knowledge base who undertook professional activities within 3 years of becoming a mother, we need a record of when their children were born, data which only exists in Wikidata for women whose children are all considered ‘notable’. We therefore have started to formulate plans for how to record information about motherhood, and other life events, in a way that preserves our imperative to centre women in our data.

4. A Community

Finally, we choose Wikibase because it isn’t just a piece of software, it is a community. The Wikibase Stakeholder Group is providing a space where we can gain expertise, share ideas, and demonstrate our commitment to trustworthy linked open data infrastructures. Our particular thanks go to Adam Shorland, Laurence ‘GreenReaper’ Parry, Lozana Rossenova, Maarten Brinkerink, and Maarten Zeinstra. We look forward to continuing to work with you over the next few years of our project.

International Women’s Day!

The Beyond Notability project is taking over the Society of Antiquaries Twitter feed for this year’s International Women’s Day!

As part of this event, we are featuring two audio recordings from the correspondence of two women who are now featured on our database: Eliza Jeffries Davis, a historian, and Margerie Venables Taylor, an archaeologist.

These recordings of letters in the Victoria County History (VCH) archive have been created by Professor Catherine Clarke (Davis) and Claire-Louise Lucas (Taylor). The project is particularly grateful to Victoria County History for permission to record the extracts and make transcriptions of them available here. We’re also very grateful to Professor Catherine Clarke and Claire-Louise Lucas for agreeing to record them.

Eliza Jeffries Davis worked for the Victoria County History as a researcher and writer in the first decade of the 20th century. She became a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1929.

Margerie Venables Taylor worked for the Victoria County History at the same time as Eliza Jeffries Davis. She became a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1925.

These two recordings feature letters sent to William Page, the general editor of the VCH, by Davis and Taylor respectively. They illuminate the working lives of these two women. Davis’s letter is celebratory, sent on the publication of the VCH volume on which she had worked. In it, she makes suggestions for publicity and in so doing highlights her non-VCH working life, as a London County Council teacher. Taylor’s letter, sent after she had been working for some years at VCH, reflects her continuing concerns about the rate of pay for VCH researchers. She also reveals the expansion of her research work beyond VCH, enabling her to push more effectively for a salary increase.

Eliza Jeffries Davis

VCH Archvie EJ Davis read by Catherine Clarke March 2022

Eliza Jeffries Davis letter to William Page, dated 5 Oct 1909, on London County Council Moorfields Training College, White Street, Moorfields E. C. letterhead (VCH 2/22/3)

Transcript:

Dear Mr Page,

Thank you for your note. I am glad the London volume is really coming out at last – though I shudder to think of the negligences + ignorances in my part!

I am writing to suggest that you tell the publishers to send a prospectus of it to the heads of various London schools and colleges. I think we discussed this once, + you asked me to remind you again. It would be so very useful in teaching, + luckily the board of Education is awake to the importance of local history just now, so the heads of schools might think it worth while to spend so much money on a book!

In the case of institutions under the LCC it would be well if the notices were sent as soon as possible, as the “Requisition” for new books (only allowed once a term) are made up about the beginning of November. I enclose lists which may be useful.

Yours sincerely,

EJ Davis

Margerie Venables Taylor

Extract from MV Taylor letter to William Page dated 24.IV.1910 from 48 Watton Crescent, Oxford (VCH 1/3/210)

Transcript

Dear Mr Page, 

I have been considering the question we discussed since I last saw you. I should very much like to work for the History again, but I think I ought to have more than 1/6d an hour. If you work out £2.10 a week, working 5-6 hours a day, inclusive of all holidays etc, it comes to more than that. At the present moment for Research work at the Bodley I am paid 2/- an hour + other workers-transcribers are paid 2/6 an hour, while the ordinary, not very skilled, catalogue assistant receives 1/6 an hour. So that I think I ought to have 2/- an hour, especially when it is not certain that the work will continue for more than two years. I put the facts before you so that you will understand my position. I really feel it is not fair to take research work at 1/6 an hour, after some years’ experiences. I am sorry to trouble you in this way, but I think you will understand + tell me exactly what you think.  […]

**If you would like to explore the lives of Eliza Jeffries Davis and Margerie Venables further, you will find them on our database at: https://beyond-notability.wiki.opencura.com/wiki/Item:Q153 (Davis); https://beyond-notability.wiki.opencura.com/wiki/Item:Q133 (Taylor).

On Working with Gender

By James, Katherine and Amara.

The subtitle of our project, is ‘Re-evaluating Women’s work in archaeology, history and heritage in Britain, 1870 – 1950′. We aim to create a large-scale study of women’s contributions to these fields by rendering visible previously unknown ‘professional’ (both salaried and unsalaried) activities of women through the study of archival sources. This requires us to identify instances in our sources of women conducting various activities we would categorise as ‘work’, and to express those as data. But how do we identify these women?

This has led the project team to chew over two issues in recent meetings:

  • How to work within, or modify, the conventions of Wikidata to deal with gender (and indeed other sensitive personal) characteristics in our database
  • The ethics of ascription of gender to people in the past

To begin, let’s consider the conventions governing how the property of gender (or ‘sex and gender’, since Wikidata currently conflates the two – and this is in itself controversial) is handled in Wikidata, the collaboratively edited knowledge graph whose linked data underpins Wikipedia and Google Search. Like other systems for the organization and systematization of knowledge, Wikidata operates by using (relatively) controlled vocabularies: lists of key terms with agreed definitions that allow records to be tagged/described in ways that render them searchable.  In order to link our data to other data sets it is important to work to some extent within conventions in order to make those links. If we were to create an entirely unique, bespoke set of categories to classify our historical data, our database would be limited in usefulness, since it would not be discoverable through standard searches or interoperable with other data ecologies. On the other hand, conventions developed in Wikidata (term lists etc) are simplifying/flattening and can be inadequate when dealing with historically constructed categories, including gender. Crowd-sourced editing of Wikidata (in which we are participating) can also lead to changes and allows for modifications.

We are constructing our database by writing statements that ascribe information to individual or classes of items/objects, including people, by linking them with particular values of properties (known in data design as key-value pairs). For example, the English language statement “milk is white” would be encoded by a statement pairing the property ‘color’ (P462) with the value ‘white’ (Q23444) under the item ‘milk’ (Q8495).

The category (property) of ‘sex or gender’ (P21) is defined in Wikidata as follows:

sex or gender identity of human or animal. For human: male, female, non-binary, intersex, transgender female, transgender male, agender. For animal: male organism, female organism.

The issue here is not only that this gloss is contestable (and indeed contested – check out the discussion on the property talk page (content warning: transphobic language)). It is also that no caveats exist around the ascription of values of this property to historical or living individuals.

The absence of caveats for ‘sex or gender’ contrasts with cases such as ‘ethnic group’ (P172)’ and ‘sexual orientation (P91)’, properties the definitions of which are hedged about with caveats:

subject’s ethnicity (consensus is that a VERY high standard of proof is needed for this field to be used. In general this means 1) the subject claims it themselves, or 2) it is widely agreed on by scholars, or 3) is fictional and portrayed as such)

the sexual orientation of the person — use IF AND ONLY IF they have stated it themselves, unambiguously, or it has been widely agreed upon by historians after their death

We are not the only people to notice Wikidata’s blunt flattening of sex and gender. The wonderful Homosaurus, a linked data vocabulary of lesbian, qay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, and others (LGBTQ+) terms, gives us a range of narrower terms we might use instead: gender identity, gender expression, assigned gender.

These narrower definitions draw attention to what we, as historians, are doing in this project. We are dealing overwhelmingly in assigned gender rather than gender identity or gender expression, i.e. gender as ascribed to historical agents in our sources and/or as perceived by us in our interpretation of those sources. We have no direct access to the gender identity of the majority of our subjects (they do not ‘state it themselves, unambiguously’). And gender expression varies over time and between places, making our particular perception of gender a determinant of how we ascribe gender.

In the sources we have been looking at so far, sources that (partially) record work in archaeology, history and heritage in Britain, ‘sex or gender’ (P21) property-values such as womanhood are either ascribed to the people that feature in them, or our sources are silent on the matter. Sometimes the (ascribed) gender of individuals in our sources is signalled in explicit fashion, e.g. by use of gendered titles such as ‘Mr’, ‘Mrs’ or ‘Miss’. In other cases there is indirect or implicit evidence of gender-ascription – not least, evidence of the various kinds of barriers and exclusions to which women were subject in 19th and early 20th century Britain.  Most obviously, individuals to whom womanhood was ascribed were excluded from being Fellows of the Society of Antiquaries until 1920, but (in the UK until 1918/1928) they were also excluded from suffrage, from taking their degrees in certain universities, from pursuing certain kinds of professional work once married, and so on.

Data Feminism gives us ways to respond to the inadequacies of Wikidata P21, both as a tool for representing the past lives that are the focus of our study and – in turn – all people effectively misgendered by its flattening effect and binary assumptions. As D’Ignazio and Klein write “data feminism requires us to challenge the gender binary, along with other systems of counting and classification that perpetuate oppression” (D’Ignazio and Klein, Data Feminism (2020), 97). Not only is questioning a classification system a feminist move, so is acting in opposition to it, refusing to contribute to it on its terms. If what gets counted counts, we need to ensure that not only are more women counted, but that they are counted in ways that make clear when their womanhood is an ascription, an identity, and an expression.

What does this mean in practice? It means a number of interventions in the way we make statements about gender and sex, none of which we claim to have got entirely right, all of which we are working though in real time as we encounter the archive and the lives therein. These include assigning gender as ‘woman’ (Q3 in our data) if:

Where gendered honorifics are absent and only initials and surname are given, even if the individual’s name appears in relation to a context and activity in which normative actors in our period are men, we do not assume that the individual indicated is a man. Rather, we investigate that name, indicate uncertainty when ascribed gender is unclear, and record ‘unknown value’ when no evidence can be found.

Finally, we are committed to using a technical infrastructure that tracks our changes, timestamps them and gives each edit an author. This enables our attempts to resist the presumption of gender ascription to be recorded, and when new information is found that revises a claim, ensures that our uncertainty – however fleeting – remains entangled with the linked data we produce.

All these solutions are provisional and imperfect. We welcome constructive feedback on the procedures we have developed so far.

Our First Trip

By Amara Thornton (Co-Investigator, Beyond Notability)

On 6 October, the Beyond Notability team took its first steps into the Society of Antiquaries archive. This will be a key research area for us, as the Society’s archive is one of our main record sets in starting to map women’s work in archaeology, history and heritage between the late 19th and the mid-twentieth centuries.  

The Society has been in existence since 1707 (more on its history here).  Its recently appointed archivist, Kat Petersen, was our guide to getting to know the SAL’s archive a bit better. She is currently going through the entire archive herself, to ensure that ultimately the Society’s rich institutional history will be discoverable through the Collections website

Our goal with this initial visit was to look at a cross section of the Society’s archive to get a better sense of the kinds of ways in which women’s work was recorded.  The Society’s Blue papers (records generated when a person is proposed as a Fellow of the Society) are an obvious starting point. However, women were not admitted as Fellows until 1920, so references to their work before that point can only be found by looking beyond that particular set of records.  

The Society’s various Minute Books are another key resource.  There are series of Minute Books for various groups within the Society, including the Executive Committee, the Council and the Finance and Library Committee. Women can be found in the Executive Committee and Council minutes before 1920 if they are sending artefacts for exhibition at the Society, reporting on discoveries made, or offering books or artefacts to the Society (Fig. 1). Another activity we’ll be tracking and highlighting is instances of women seeking to use the resources of the Society for their own purposes (Fig. 2). 

Fig. 1. Detail from the Society’s Executive Committee Minutes from 3 July 1913, showing that a “Miss Cobbe” offered the Society a group of manuscripts relating to Bedfordshire. © The Society of Antiquaries of London. 
Fig. 2. Detail from the Society’s Executive Committee Minutes from 18 June 1914, showing that a “Miss Portal” applied to copy extracts from a manuscript held by the Society. © The Society of Antiquaries of London. 

A further valuable record set is the Special Committee Minute Books. We looked through one volume of these, dating from the years immediately after the Second World War. We found the names of FSAs Marjerie Venables Taylor and Kathleen Kenyon among the members of some of the Committees. On the Society’s Apulia Committee, gathered to organise excavations in this region of southern Italy, we spotted the name of another woman, “Mrs J. S. P. Bradford”. “Mrs Bradford” accompanied her husband John Spencer Purvis Bradford, FSA, on a scoping mission to Italy prior to a formal application being made to excavate.  

Thanks to Francesca Radcliffe’s biography of John Bradford, a bit more information about Patience (Andrewes) Bradford is available. Prior to her marriage, she attended the Courtauld Institute, and was part of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY) during the Second World War. Radcliffe’s research reveals that during her lifetime Patience Andrewes Bradford was considered to be an expert in medieval archaeology and art – and that in the 1960s, she took over the management of the Apulia Committee.   

Through our project, we will be bringing together archival records at the Society of Antiquaries with information from other associated archives and sources, ensuring that we can view each of these women as individuals within the context of their time, and as a network linked across time. The first step in our programme is to understand how the Society’s institutional archive is constructed and what parts of the Society’s activities over time it represents, all the while taking note of the ways in which women appear in the records. 

We can’t wait for our next trip!