About this Digital Humanities Project

Research Scope

The corpus covers modern Serbian history within the wider Yugoslav and Southeast European context. Čačak and western Serbia form an important geographical focus, but local history is not treated as a narrow regional field. It provides an analytical framework for examining broader historical processes in a clearly defined social and cultural setting.

The main subjects include local modernity, urban transformation, socialist modernisation, political culture, symbolic practices, national ideology, war, occupation, propaganda, memory culture, religious practices, public space, cultural heritage, museum interpretation, sport and the public use of the past.

Čačak and western Serbia therefore serve as case-study settings through which broader processes of modernisation, political mobilisation, war, memory and cultural change can be examined in local institutions, public spaces, rituals, monuments, museums, sacred sites and everyday life.

Entity Graph and Evidence-Based Relations

Alongside the thematic clusters, the project maintains an Entity Graph of the Research Corpus. This layer identifies people, institutions, places and historical sources found in selected publications and assigns stable internal identifiers to them. It makes recurring actors, institutions, locations and source materials traceable across otherwise different studies.

Relations are represented as structured statements in the form subject → relation → object. Controlled predicates distinguish different kinds of claims, such as authorship, visits, places of birth or death, institutional preservation of sources, use of historical sources and the subject matter of publications.

The entity layer is provenance-aware. A relation may record the publication that provides its evidential or analytical context (source_id), the relevant page or section (evidence_page), a short explanation (evidence_note) and a confidence value. Historical sources are also modelled as entities in their own right and are therefore distinguished from the publication used to document a relation.

The underlying entity and relation files can be inspected and downloaded from the Entity Graph data downloads.

Bibliographic Metadata and Historiographical Interpretation

The project distinguishes between an intellectual work, a particular published edition and the records that describe them in catalogues, repositories, identifier systems and scholarly databases. These records may refer to the same work or edition, but they are not interchangeable.

It also distinguishes verifiable bibliographic metadata from interpretative relationships. Author names, titles, publication dates, publishers, ISBNs, DOI values and library records can be checked against external sources. Connections between a publication, a research theme and a cluster are based on historiographical interpretation.

This distinction helps readers understand which parts of the graph describe recorded facts and which parts express an analytical reading of the corpus. A fuller explanation is available on the Method page.

The same principle applies to datasets and entity relations: a recorded field or identifier can be verified against a source, while the decision to model a thematic, comparative or conceptual relationship remains an explicit scholarly judgement.

Comparative and Contextual Scholarship

Selected publications are linked to relevant external scholarship through a curated research-discovery layer. These links are intended to situate individual works within broader historiographical, theoretical and comparative contexts without rewriting the bibliography of the original publication.

Some contextual relations are displayed directly to readers, while others remain only in structured machine-readable layers. Labels such as visible, visibleCore, machine-only and extended describe modes of presentation and curation, not levels of scholarly value.

Why this is a Digital Humanities Project

The project brings together historical interpretation, bibliographic description, knowledge organisation, structured metadata, open data and public history within an author-led scholarly website.

Digital methods are used not merely to disseminate publications but to model relationships among works, editions, research concepts, named entities, historical sources, datasets and external scholarship. Controlled vocabularies, provenance fields and machine-readable relations make those connections explicit and reusable while keeping them grounded in historical source criticism.

The project therefore treats the website as research infrastructure: a human-readable scholarly interface is paired with structured data that can be inspected, downloaded, compared and reused by other researchers and digital systems.

This approach is particularly relevant to humanities publications, museum catalogues, local-history studies and non-English scholarship that may be incompletely represented in international discovery systems. Connecting such work with persistent identifiers, authority records and reusable data makes it easier to find, verify and cite.

How to Use the Project

• Researchers and students may use the site to identify publications, follow recurring research themes and locate DOI, repository, Wikidata and library records.
• Editors, librarians and museum professionals may use it to check bibliographic metadata, author identifiers and links between publications, catalogues and repositories.
• Digital humanities and public history researchers may examine it as an author-led knowledge graph connecting historiography, local history, museum scholarship, cultural heritage and structured data.
• Researchers working across the corpus may use the entity and relation data to trace recurring people, institutions, places and historical sources across multiple publications.
• Comparative historians may use the scholarly-context layer as a discovery aid for placing individual publications within wider Southeast European and European historiography.

Related Sections

• Knowledge Graph and Digital Visibility

  The main entry point to the thematic structure of the scholarly corpus.

• Method

  A methodological explanation of works, editions, records, research clusters, bibliographic metadata and interpretative relationships.

• Entity Graph of the Research Corpus

  A human-readable view of people, institutions, places, historical sources and provenance-aware relations across selected publications.

• Entity Graph Data / Downloads

  CSV and JSON-LD distributions for entities, controlled relation types, source-based relations and integrity checking.

• Data

  Downloadable CSV, JSON and JSON-LD files from the digital scholarly corpus.

• Data Dictionary

  Documentation of data fields, controlled values, DOI distinctions, licensing and citation.

• Local Modernity and Symbolic Power in Southeast Europe

  The main research framework connecting the thematic clusters.

• Main Academic Profile

  Academic profile, selected works, bibliography and public professional activity.

• Serbian Version

  Српска верзија прегледа дигиталнохуманистичког пројекта.

Suggested Citation

Individual publications should normally be cited through the publication itself, its main DOI, a specific edition or a repository record. When structured publication, entity or relation data are reused, the relevant data file and its documentation should also be cited.