2TBI: 2wards a Transnational Biographical Infrastructure 2TBI has three main goals: 1 - Enriching and linking data on the life courses of transnationally mobile persons, starting out from a sample of Dutch social reformers in the period 1840-1914 and their participation in international congresses; 2 - Integrating (meta-)data on international organisations in the period 1914-1940, exploring the involvement of Dutch(wo)men; 3 - Feasibility study for the enlargement of the CLARIAH-person-entity portal towards the study of transnational cultural mobility in Europe and beyond. The research pilot tests infrastructural improvements of Clariah components (in particular WP2), results in scientific output (one article on the infrastructural component and one on connections across borders), and advances the community of researchers into transnational biographies.

1. 2TBI: Towards an International
Biographical Infrastructure
Thomas D’haeninck (UGent)
Lodewijk Petram (Huygens ING)

2. Social reform in a transnational perspective
• 2TBI:
A sample of around 1100 Dutch persons involved in reformist initiatives at an international
level.
2TBI was carried out by teams at Maastricht University, Ghent University, Huygens ING and
Lab1100. Contact: Nico Randeraad, n.randeraad@maastrichtuniversity.nl
• Part of TIC collaborative, a collaborative digital humanities project, focusing on
transnational intellectual cooperation (TIC) in the long nineteenth century, in particular
on transnational connections in the field of social reform.
http://www.tic.ugent.be/

3. TIC in numbers
• People: 23 221
• Congresses: 1648
• Organisations: 5664
• Publications: 23 164
• Letters: 2 638
0
20
40
60
80
100
120
1840 1850 1860 1870 1880 1890 1900 1910
Ncongresses
Year
International reformist congresses
4.76%
95.24%
2TBI Other data TIC

5. TIC: Virtual Research Environment
The platform includes (content):
(1) a relational database which links international congresses, international
organizations, people and publications
(2) a corpus that integrates digitized primary sources concerning
international congresses (e.g. conference proceedings, reports, lectures
and attendees lists) and international organizations (e.g. yearbooks,
periodicals, articles of association and pamphlets)
Selection: RESEARCH DRIVEN
(3) a bibliography of relevant publications regarding transnational social
reform in the long 19th century
(4) general communication and cooperation possibilities.

6. Text collection
• 1200 conference
proceedings, > 1 million
pages
• OCR text correction
• Full text search
• Faceted search
• Annotation
• Export
• API / SPARQL
 Digital text analysis

7. Clustered causes international social reform
congresses before 1914.

8. Organizations

9. Visitors of international congresses
(Belgians and Dutchmen)
1840-1860 1860-1880
1880-1900 1900-1918

10. Linked Open Data(LOD)
• 2TBI:
• Main purpose: testing ResourceSync connection between Nodegoat (work
environment TIC) and ANANSI (LOD environment)
• New research lines: several internationally active reformers do not appear in
standard national biographies (75%!!)
• See also: Nico Randeraad, Dutch Social Reformers in Transnational Space, 1840-
1914: Reflections on the CLARIAH Research Pilot 2TBI, Journal of Historical
Network Research 2 (2018): to be published.
• 2 datasets already available in ANANSI
• 2TBI
• Linked to Biografisch Portaal (only 25% matches!)
• TIC masterlist of congresses and organisations
• Will be linked to the data of the Union of international associations.

11. LOD strategy

12. 2TBI in Anansi

13. ResourceSync in practice

14. Entity linkage

15. ANANSI: suggestions for future developments
• Front end: user-friendly
• Information flow between work environment and LOD
environment
• Corrections, complementary information, other linked datasets
• Explorative tools
• Linking datasets: manual exercise