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- Annastiina Ahola, Lilli Peura, Rafael Leal, Heikki Rantala and Eero Hyvönen: Using generative AI and LLMs to enrich art collection metadata for searching, browsing, and studying art history in Digital Humanities
- Eero Hyvönen, Petri Leskinen, Alexandre Lionnet, Blandine Blukacz-Louisfert, Pierre-Etienne Bourneuf, Davide Rodogno, Grégoire Mallard, and Florian Cafiero: Linked Open Data Approach to Study the Assembly Minutes of International Organizations and Their Underlying Prosopography in the Real World Context
- Eero Hyvönen, Petri Leskinen, Alexandre Lionnet, Blandine Blukacz-Louisfert, Pierre-Etienne Bourneuf, Davide Rodogno, Grégoire Mallard, and Florian Cafiero: A Linked Open Data Infrastructure for Studying Historical Activities of International Organizations: First Results on the League of Nations (1920-1946)
- Petri Leskinen, Eero Hyvönen, Alexandre Lionnet, Blandine Blukacz-Louisfert, Pierre-Etienne Bourneuf, Davide Rodogno, Grégoire Mallard, and Florian Cafiero: A Linked Open Data Service and Semantic Portal to Study the Assembly Minutes and Prosopography of the League of Nations (1920–1946)
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Minutes of Multilateralism: League of Nations, United Nations, and Geneva-based Organizations on the Semantic Web |
Sampo-UI landing page for the League of Nations data
Project Overview
The “Minutes of Multilateralism” is an innovative digital humanities project, lead by the Centre for Digital Humanities and Multilateralism (CDHM), Geneva, Switzerland, designed to create an online platform where researchers, practitioners and the general public will engage with the minutes of the Geneva-based international organisations, starting from the League of Nations. By aggregating, interlinking and enriching data, the platform will foster research and provide insights into the role of International Geneva as a multilateral ecosystem. The “Minutes of Multilateralism” is an extension of a pilot project that will be launched early 2026 which will include the minutes of the Assembly of the League of Nations (1920-1939), the General Assembly of the United Nations (1945-today), and later of other Geneva-based organizations.
The project will rely on a combination of: a) official minutes that are already digitised and made available online by international organisations; and b) public records that will be digitised by the CDHM (where the associated, source PDFs are housed on their original organisation-specific platforms). The latest Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software are used on the existing PDF to extract the text and convert it into machine-readable data. This will allow the platform’s users to read, visualise and analyse a vast body of data, covering all the International Geneva fields of activities.The minutes will be enriched with additional information, such as biographical information about the speakers, delegates and representatives. The platform will enable myriad research methodologies, such as prosopographical research, and will show how international issues were discussed in different settings, uncovering little known connections among the different stakeholders. The Minutes of Multilateralism platform will at the same time increase the visibility of Geneva-based international organisations’ archives, facilitate research and stimulate innovative academic inquiry.
The SeCo group's role in the project is to design and implement the user interface for the envisioned Minutes of Multilateralism publication portal platform based on the Sampo model, re-using the framework of ParliamentSampo - Parliament of Finland on the Semantic Web. The platform is based on two knowldge graphs: one representing the minutes and and the other one the speakers and the underlying organizational structures. The data comes from different international and Geneva-based archives and builds upon work of earlier projects and systems, such as LONSEA and Metagrid.ch.
Our work has started in 2025 with the minutes of the Assembly of the League of Nations (LoN) (1920-1945) and continues with the minutes of the General Assembly of the United Nations (1945-today) and Inter-Parliamentary Union IPU. The minutes data were OCR'd and named entities recognized by Dr. Florian Cafiero and his research group at the École des Chartes (Université PSL), Paris. This data was then transformed into a knowledge graph, enriched by external data sources, and published in a SPARQL endpoint on top of which the League of Nations Sampo was created at the Aalto University in collaboration with the other parties. Our first demonstrator is described in detail in (Leskinen et al, 2026).
Contact Persons
- Prof. Gregoire Mallard, Geneva Graduate Institute, Center for Digital Humanities and Multilateralism (CDHM), Geneva, Switzerland
- Dr. Florian Cafiero, École nationale des chartes - PSL and Geneva Graduate Institute, Center for Digital Humanities and Multilateralism (CDHM), Geneva
- Dr. Petri Leskinen, Aalto University and Geneva Graduate Institute, Center for Digital Humanities and Multilateralism (CDHM), Geneval
- Prof. Eero Hyvönen, Aalto University, University of Helsinki, and Geneva Graduate Institute, Center for Digital Humanities and Multilateralism (CDHM)
Support of the Finnish Digital Humanities research infrastructure initiative FIN-CLARIAH/DARIAH-FI funded by the Research Council of Finland and NextConnectionEU is acknowledged. Computational resources of CSC -- IT Center for Science have been used in the research.
