[EN] The Armenian Ark: Evidence of the Armenian People's Emigration to North America in the 1930s

The source is a database with various queries and detailed filters searching for information about a person: by name, place of birth or death, place of residence and residence address, and more.

For example, there is a dataset with information about the personal information of passengers and the ships on which they arrived. https://markarslan.org/ArmenianImmigrants/ShipManifests.csv.

Project link: https://markarslan.org/ArmenianImmigrants/Public-ProjectReportsandQueries.php?submit=Project+Reports+%26+Queries

Other historical sources and datasets can be found in the History group at https://data.opendata.am.

If you know of new sources, please share that knowledge with us!

#opendata #armenia #history #emigrants

[EN, AM ↓] 3D Models preserving Armenian cultural heritage

We continue introducing our team’s findings to you. Today’s highlights are the two sources with three-dimensional models of Armenian cultural sites. Such reconstructions are a wild-card when dealing with objects that are unavailable either due to their far-away location or imminent threat of destruction, especially in the post-war periods. 3D models allow us to monitor their state and disseminate cultural knowledge. Sometimes we have to preserve the digital images of fragile buildings or those already demolished, which will enable generations to come to restore their initial appearance as a 100% precise extract.

The first one is a catalogue by 3Bee.io which already contains almost 20 models that can also be viewed in Virtual Reality. The implementers of the project capture the data at the highest possible resolutions and archive them in raw formats so that it can be re-processed in future.

The second one is fulfilled by the Research on Armenian Architecture team and displays 3D videoclips and images of locations in Ani and Khtzkonk (Western Armenia).

Overall, much more work on these is needed to digitalize Armenia’s cultural heritage. However, file-format support and longevity are major considerations for digital preservation, and the field is yet to develop its best practices. As for now, .PLY (polygon file) and .OBJ (object file) are deemed more appropriate as they are widely supported and compatible across platforms [1].

Other historical sources and datasets can be found in the History group at https://data.opendata.am.
If you are aware of other sources, please share them with us!

#opendata #armenia #history #architecture

[1]Using Three-Dimensional Modeling to Preserve Cultural Heritage (2017). https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2017/01/using-three-dimensional-modeling-to-preserve-cultural-heritage/

[EN] And here are some new inspiring 3D models, this time of Geghard monastery alongside Ani. They are published at the Open Heritage website. Open Heritage 3D is a project dedicated to making primary 3D cultural heritage data open and accessible as well as to ease sharing these data for publishers.

CyArc which led the documentation of both sites is one of the most authoritative in the field of digital culture preservation. Interestingly, Geghard Monastery was immortalized by the high schoolers of the TUMO Center for Creative Technologies during the two-week workshop ran by CyArk.

Feel free to share if you know any other interesting data sources aimed at preserving cultural heritage.

#opendata #armenia #history #architecture

Natural Language Processing can enhance not only our communication and language knowledge, but also strengthen the historical studies.

Marcella Tambuscio and Tara Lee Andrews in their Geolocation and Named Entity Recognition in Ancient Texts: A Case Study about Ghewond’s Armenian History apply Named Entity Recognition (NER) to Ghewond’s Armenian History. This facilitates drawing the ‘big picture’ of Armenian history in that period and matching historical toponyms with their contemporary counterparts. The outcomes and reproducible validated results of applying the model are published on GitHub. We also added them to our data catalog.

We believe that such studies are going to become more common, making ancient texts more available to a wider public and to the professional community. Tell us if you are aware of similar efforts in the field!

#opendata #armenia #history #language

if you are looking for historical data to visualize take a look at documents published by Russian Electronic Library (REL)

For example, they publish a lot of historical statistical bulletins like this one: Erivan Province First General Population Census of the Russian Empire 1987 [1]

which is part of First General Population Census of the Russian Empire in 1897 [2].

Many more documents and creative works available in REL, Australian Trove Project [3] and Europeana [4]

[1] https://rusneb.ru/catalog/000200_000018_v19_rc_1629518/
[2] https://rusneb.ru/catalog/000200_000018_v19_rc_1629421/
[3] https://trove.nla.gov.au
[4] https://www.europeana.eu

#culture #armenia #armenians #history