Narration Through Data: The Life and Relationships of a Fourteenth-Century Tuscan Merchant

Abstract

This contribution explores how the work carried out by the DARIAH-IT research team at the Italian Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Istituto Opera del Vocabolario Italiano (OVI-CNR), supports biographical research on historical figures by developing an interoperable digital ecosystem for humanities and cultural heritage research. In this context, the RESTORE project was created with the aim of supporting biographical as well as philological and linguistic research on Francesco di Marco Datini, a merchant from Prato (Italy), who established a successful commercial network across Europe during the fourteenth century. RESTORE has gathered several datasets from multiple sources, including letters and other auto/biographical documents (both images and transcriptions), archival and accounting records, catalogs, and digital representations of artworks commissioned or owned by Datini and his family.  Subsequently, a platform has been set up that brings together digital resources from several cultural institutions, allowing researchers to track relationships and connections among the data gathered from these materials in a single integrated semantic knowledge base aggregating Linked Open Data. This enables researchers to take a broad prosopographic approach, while also facilitating an in-depth exploration of specific aspects, such as welfare and religion. The platform also enables users to study the everyday life of historical figures by analyzing, for instance, the correspondence between Francesco Datini and his wife, Margherita, and other members of the family or collaborators. The project provides access to several resource types, including images and transcriptions, which offer different levels of detail of information. Additionally, the RESTORE research team has addressed the challenges faced by cultural institutions in managing the data lifecycle of digital resources, aiming to build a FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) knowledge base enriched with scholarly information. This approach enhances research opportunities and enables integrated storytelling across diverse data collections. The models and solutions developed during this process are designed to be replicable by other institutions, ensuring the project’s long-term sustainability.