Linked Pasts is an annual symposium dedicated to facilitating practical and pragmatic developments in Linked Open Data in History, Classics, Geography, and Archaeology. It brings together leading exponents of Linked Data from academia, the Cultural Heritage sector as well as providers of infrastructures and library services to address the obstacles to, and issues raised by, developing a digital ecosystem of projects dedicated to interlinking online resources about the past.

Initiated in 2015 at King’s College London, the second Linked Pasts symposium took place at the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia in Madrid. Last year it moved to the Stanford Humanities Centre and now returns to Europe, with the Mainz’ Centre for Digitality in the Humanities and Cultural Studies (mainzed) honoured to welcome this year’s meeting.

Linked Pasts has given researchers and professionals from diverse backgrounds the opportunity to share ideas, methods, and workflows in the light of their own experiences and expertise — on the one hand interrogating current technical challenges, and on the other, working towards collective approaches to solving them.

In the light of a fast growing interest on Linked Data in the Digital Humanities and the potential of LOD for overwriting established disciplinary limits, this year’s symposium aims to focus on the communities within this emerging „linked pasts network,“ with their differing dynamics and workflows. In a series of six sequential sessions, representatives and practitioners of LOD-communities will assess, discuss and review their approaches along three main themes: people, institutions and methods, complemented by an extensive poster session and parallel breakout-discussions on three special topics.

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