Cultural History Baseball Cards

Concept:

Pick a player, view their cultural history card, browse related primary and secondary resources. A collaboration with Library of Congress Labs, Cultural History Baseball Cards is a proof of concept showcasing a way to use Linked Open Data to connect diverse corpora.

What we did:

1. Conducted user research on a set of baseball historians.
2. Collected content related to baseball from JSTOR (using a topic model), Library of Congress (hand-curated from a collection they were compiling for their Baseball Americana exhibit) and the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Extracted entities from the content and created a baseball-related knowledge graph.
3. Conducted a flash build at the Library of Congress with the LC Labs team, a week that ended with this web-streamed event.
4. Polished and released Cultural History Baseball Cards as an open prototype.

What we built:

What we learned:

1. Many baseball historians of baseball capitalize on students’ excitement about baseball to get them engaged in the scholarly study of history and culture, including issues related to race, class, labor, gender and colonialism.
2. Linked open data shows great promise as a way of bringing to together diverse materials.