Summer Research Update

This summer I am continuing to work on the Moravian Lives project. Within the project, I read and semantically tag memoirs for people’s names, places, events, and other important entities. Using this information, we hope to be able to answer interesting questions involving the Moravian community.

One of the interesting questions that we have encountered recently is whether every person and place is worthy of a unique identifier. Originally, we were only giving unique identifiers to people who we had memoirs for and places we deemed to be important to the Moravian world in some way. However, recently we decided to give all places and people mentioned unique identifiers. We came to this decision because we don’t have a good idea of whether these people and places are important yet. While they may not be mentioned a lot in the memoirs we have already read, there are still a ton of memoirs we have not gone through and these people and places may be critical in those.