Leveraging the use of knowledge graphs to extract Collections as Data: a Spanish Civil War use case

Over the last decade Cultural Heritage (CH) organisations have explored new ways to make their digital collections available to encourage their reuse in innovative and creative ways. The objective of the present study was to examine how cross-collection approaches based on these principles may be applied to historical research, using an experimental framework to extract datasets suitable for computational use from data structured as knowledge graphs. The purpose of the framework is to facilitate wider re-use and analysis of existing datasets in historical research and to help create the conditions for closer collaboration between cultural heritage and historical research agendas in this area in future. The framework was then applied to a selection of repositories focused on a specific historical domain: the Spanish Civil War. A detailed analysis that can be useful for CH organisations interested in publishing and studying their datasets for historical or other purposes is provided. Limitations in terms of scope and open issues requiring further work are outlined.