The availability of born digital data as well as digitised collections, is changing the way we study and understand the humanities. This amount of information has even greater potential for research when semantic links can be established, and relationships between entities highlighted. The work of several projects presented in the workshop have shown that connecting historical data according to their common reference to places (expressed via URIs stored in gazetteers) is a particularly powerful approach to investigating digital textual and image-based sources. The power of linked data is that it enables search and query beyond one's own projects, and allows leverage of the quantity of relationships between semantic connections that can be made and discovered.

This workshop is designed to show that working with semantic data searches is not meant to render specific results, but rather to highlight how, just as humanities scholarship is about interpretation, association and occasional serendipity, digital humanities scholarship can be used to discover distributions, anomalies, or patterns, rather than specific answers.

This workshop will introduce a range of tools which, when used as part of a pipeline, can enable the extraction, linking and visualisation of semantic data found in historical sources. These will include tools for creating annotations (Recogito) conceptualising linked open data (a TripleStore) and sharing linked data (Wikidata and Peripleo).