PROJECT BACKGROUND
The Semantic Lab at Pratt serves as a testbed and an incubator for the development of novel methodologies and tools for the application of semantic technologies to libraries, archives and museums. Through an ongoing collaboration with The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Villa I Tatti, two researchers from the Semantic Lab at Pratt - Sarah Ann Adams and Mary Mann - read through the Mary Berenson's 1903-1904 "Trip to America" diary, and annotated every entity found within. These entites fell into the broad categories of "date", "location", "organization", "person", and "miscellaneous", with the miscellaneous category further subdivided into "event", "sentiment", "theme", "literature", "music", "non-fiction", "poetry", "theater", and "visual art".
Overview of entites extracted from Mary Berenson's diary 1903-1904 diary for The Mary Berenson Project
While the main purpose of manually annotating these entities from Mary's diary was to create a dataset against which the entity extraction tool DADAlytics could be tested, the resultant dataset was valuable in and of itself as a way to begin learning about Mary's social and cultural landscape. This Omeka S site highlights twelve of the visual artworks Mary saw during her 1903-1904 "Trip to America", and was created to fulfill a requirement for the Spring 2019 Museum Information Management course at Pratt Institute, School of Information, taught by Jennifer Cwiok and Iris Lee.