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Historical Canadian Persons

Information from the Dictionary of Canadian Biography was selectively augmented from other resources including Wikidata and scholarly sources to provide fundamental information about individuals and their families, such as marital status, occupation, residence, and gender. Unnamed individuals are included with labels such as “A Free Black mother.” Place names are geolocated. A small selection of links to digitized Canadian census records and fonds published by Library and Archives Canada are included. The data includes links to the sections of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography entries from which the set of individuals covered in the datasets and the primary assertions about them were derived.

Although the team devised a preliminary model for nationality aligned with other LINCS data, in the end designations related to individuals’ nationality, national origin and ethnicity were not carried over from the source. The team lacked decolonized vocabularies against which to map terms for First Nations, Inuit and Métis people, and was wary both of perpetuating colonial terminology and of omitting such designations solely for Indigenous people.

Creators and Contributors

Jim Clifford, Susan Brown, Sarah Roger, Natalie Hervieux, Matthew Kunkel, Jakob McLellan, Zach Shoenberger, Thomas Smith, Jessica Ye, Dani Metilli, Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship (LINCS)

Support

The Historical Canadian Persons dataset was made possible thanks to the generous support of Library and Archives Canada, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Forward Linking Partnership Development Grant.

SPARQL Queries About The Dataset

The following query results provide insights into the classes/terms used within the dataset. (http://graph.lincsproject.ca/hist-canada/hist-cdns is the named graph for the Historical Canadian Persons dataset.)

You can also refer to the application profile for this dataset for an explanation about how these classes and terms are used.

Stats about Historical Canadian Persons

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Classes Used By Historical Canadian Persons

The following table lists the classes used in the Historical Canadians graph, along with the number of instances of each class.

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Vocabulary Terms Used By Historical Canadian Persons

The following table lists the namespaces of vocabulary terms used in the Historical Canadians data, along with the number of unique terms from each namespace and a list of those terms.

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