Making publics 2.0: humanities data linked through a topical repository

Our previous project, Making Publics (MaPs http://www.makingpublics.org), examined voluntary forms of publics in early modern Europe 1500--1700 [1] and resulted in the creation of a corpus of databases of people, places, and artifacts. These databases catalogue the nearly 2,000 works cited in over 200 articles, papers, books, and essays written by its members. These works contain numerous references to people, places, things, and their interactions on various topics, such as common interests, tastes, and desires in early modern Europe. MaPs allows its users to continue this research in public making through collaboration, collating new references to people, places, things that make up the forms of association around shared interests and topics. Throughout 2012, we re-envisaged how the website might operate to further research as well as present the research findings of the project which ended in 2010. Central to this was consideration of how a web application might serve to both organize and foster ongoing research, and make that research data available to other humanities users in the form of Linked Open Data.