Project Demonstration: Event Builder (Brent Nelson, Craig Harkema, Kyle Dase, Ryan Gayowski, Darryl Friesen)

Link to the full presentation here. ABSTRACT: In this demonstration, we will present “Event Builder,” a new web-based program for building events from TEI-encoded XML documents. This software is being developed to support the Social Network of Early Modern Collectors project, which aims to trace the movement of objects that were collected, exchanged, and viewed in cabinets of curiosities in England and Scotland c. 1580-1700. We ultimately aim to produce visualizations that insert objects into people networks and express how those people related to these objects: as collectors, suppliers, couriers, creators, manipulators, or simply viewers of objects. These visuals will be expressed as events involving these objects as articulated in XML markup. The XML documents are transcriptions of early printed books and manuscripts that describe collected objects and cabinets of curiosities that contained them. In Event Builder, the user selects an XML document and identifies a structural element that forms the context for a mention of an object (<item>, <seg>, or <p>). Event Builder presents a rendering of the corresponding passage, with names of people, places, and objects highlighted with associated @ref values that reference the project database. The user then selects the type of action expressed in the event (acquisition, production, manipulation, or observation) and connects people to the object at the centre of the event, identifying their role(s) in the event (recipient, producer, manipulator, etc.) and thus, implicitly, their action in relation to the object. The user is then able to select the place where the event occurred and the date the event took place (if these are recorded in the document). Event Builder is a bespoke tool designed for the needs of a particular project and a particular set of data, but we hope others will find it useful as a model, and perhaps even consider using adapting the code for other projects with an interest in recording, visualizing, analyzing events as recorded in historical documents.