A Platform for Collaborative Historical Research based on Volunteered Geographical Information

Abstract

Digital humanities research promotes the intersection between digital technologies and humanities, em- phasizing free knowledge sharing and collaborative work. Based on digital humanities features, this paper describes the architecture of a computational platform for collaborative historical research designed and developed in an ongoing project called Pauliceia 2.0. This project aims to produce historical data of São Paulo city from 1870 to 1940 and to develop a computational platform that allows researchers to explore, integrate and share urban historical data sets. The Pauliceia 2.0 platform main goal is to use volunteered geographical information (VGI) and crowdsourcing concepts to produce past geographical data and to allow historians to share historical data sets resulting from their researches. In this work, we present the Pauliceia 2.0 platform architecture and its underlying VGI protocol.