SoNAR: Bridging Cultural Heritage and Digital Research

Libraries, archives, and museums are treasure troves of information – not just about objects, books, and records, but also about the people behind them. Who created an artifact? Who published a text? How were individuals and organizations connected? These relationships form the backbone of our cultural heritage, helping us understand the context of creation, usage, and discovery.

This contextual information – whether it’s the link between a creator and their work or the affiliation of a person with an organization or the relationship between two people – is invaluable. It allows us to describe, classify, and interpret the collections held by museums, libraries, and archives individually and in connection with each other. While collections vary across organizations, their potential as resources is immense: when organized as structured data, they can be used in cutting-edge digital research methods, such as Historical Network Analysis.

Introducing SoNAR

The Berlin State Library and the Berlin School of Library and Information Science have joined forces to launch SoNAR (Social Network Analysis and Related Research), a modern research data marketplace, that addresses the need for machine-readable contextual information. Funded by the German Research Foundation, SoNAR is supported by an advisory board of leading scholars and data service providers, including:

• Integrated Authority File (German National Library, link)
• Social Networks and Archival Context Cooperative (link)
• Museum Digital (link)
• KALLIOPE Union Catalog (link)
• Union Catalog of Serials (link)

SoNAR builds on the success of its predecessor, SoNAR-IDH (Interfaces to Data for Historical Social Network Analysis and Research), taking its mission further. By integrating cultural heritage and research data repositories, SoNAR extracts both explicit and implicit statements about agents and their relationships. Through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), researchers can curate datasets tailored to their needs.

In short: SoNAR provides Historical Network Research with a dynamic, ever-growing dataset – one where every statement is linked back to its original source. This modern marketplace tackles a major challenge in the field: assembling the critical mass of data needed to study historical social contexts.

What SoNAR will offer researchers and cultural heritage institutions

• A Social Knowledge Graph: At its core, SoNAR provides a social knowledge graph, a web of connections that maps relationships between agents: persons, organizations, families.
• Advanced Dashboard: Researchers can use an advanced dashboard to explore contributing repositories and assess data availability for their specific topics.
• Open Educational Resources: SoNAR will offer OERs that demonstrate how to apply interactive computational methods to historical network research. Special focus is placed on advanced visualization techniques, offering new perspectives on even the most well-studied historical topics.
• Best Practices for Data Integration: The project team will continue work on extracting information about agents and agent relations from historical text sources, such as newspapers. The result will be a best practice guide on integrating both advanced technologies into digitization workflows and extracted data into the social knowledge graph.

Collaboration and Community

SoNAR is committed to fostering collaboration. The project team will work with data literacy centers like QUADRIGA and HERMES, as well as National Research Infrastructure Initiatives such as NFDI4Culture, NFDI4Memory, and Text+.

Project Timeline

SoNAR will run from October 2025 to March 2028.

Learn More

• German Research Foundation Project Page (link)
• SoNAR on GitHub (including funding proposal) (link)
• Berlin School of Library and Information Science Project Page (link)

Contact information

Gerhard Müller (SoNAR-Co-Lead, Email: gerhard.mueller@sbb.spk-berlin.de), Felix Ostrowski (SoNAR-Co-Lead, Email: felix.ostrowski@sbb.spk-berlin.de)

SoNAR is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation – 558129968)