textiles | Daniel Antal

Linking Garments to Knowledge: TextileBase as an Interdisciplinary Graph for Dress and Textile Research

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The article demonstrates how dress history and textile-related research can be enhanced through the interoperability of knowledge provided by a knowledge graph. The growing availability of digital cultural and historical data is not matched by a similar increase in their usability. Therefore, expanding the search radius to collections across disciplines and countries requires harmonisation and interoperability of knowledge. Reprex has created TextileBase – a knowledge base fully interoperable with libraries, archives, museums, the open knowledge system Wikidata, and open science repository systems. The article highlights key considerations when formulating searches and addressing terminology dissimilarities to ensure that data providers working across country, language, or disciplinary boundaries understand the intended meaning. To improve and streamline searchability in libraries for textual sources mentioning relevant historical garments, archives for their contemporary depictions, and museum collections for new artefacts, TextileBase transforms data and metadata into knowledge statements, links terms to an international controlled vocabulary, and carefully compares the works of various research and collection institutions.

TextileBase

Sun, 11 May 2025 15:05:10 +0100

TextileBase is a platform to collect, connect, and share knowledge about historical clothing.
It links artefacts, photographs, secondary sources, and institutional records into a multilingual, interoperable, and searchable knowledge graph.

By bringing together scattered records from museums, archives, researchers, and businesses, TextileBase enables richer stories about how people dressed, lived, and expressed themselves.

Why Textiles?

Unlike stone or metal, textiles are fragile. Few garments survive beyond a century. What we know often comes from dispersed museum pieces, old photographs, or drawings — often in different languages and formats.

TextileBase connects these fragments into one network: a living map of dress history.

Who is TextileBase for?

Museums & archives — link dispersed collections into larger platforms such as Europeana and ECCCH.
Researchers & cultural heritage projects — manage data to FAIR/8-star standards, publish reusable datasets, data papers, and visualisations.
Businesses — from sustainable fashion to cultural tourism, TextileBase supports digital product passports, provenance tracking, and heritage storytelling.

Connect artefacts, images, and texts into one collaborative, AI-supported research space.

👉 Build on shared knowledge: Technical details & offering

TextileBase is not only about preserving the past — it’s about making data usable now, for research, heritage, and innovation.

Examples from the Database

Connecting dispersed artefacts: 19th-century Latgalian garments in one linked dataset (Q142, Q180, Q179, Q181).

Connecting Artefacts Across Borders

Understanding Secondary Sources

Enriching records with secondary sources: trousers identified from a 1913 Seto photograph (Q331).

Following Shifting Place Names

Tracing shifting place names: a Livonian skirt recorded under Finnish, German, Livonian, and Latvian toponyms (Q347).

Building a Wikimuseum for Dispersed Collections

Inspired by Wikimedia Estonia’s multi-language, open-access model, we propose a virtual museum—a Wikimuseum—that brings together:

Artefacts from rural museums (e.g., Mõniste, Saatse, Värska)
Items in national museums (Estonia, Finland, Hungary)
Private collections that would never be physically exhibited together

Building a Wikimuseum: connecting dispersed collections across languages, borders, and institutions. See early prototype: Seto Traditional Clothing.

👉🏿 Preview Presentation The Concept of a WikiMuseum: WikiMuseum = GLAM Wiki + Wikibase + Data Sharing Space press F for full-screen view (to be presented at WikimediaCEE 2025 in Thessaloniki.)

Next Steps

👉🏻 Visit the TextileBase website

👉🏾 Subscribe (PDF)

👉🏼 Get in touch

Linked Open Datasets on Garments from the Latgale Region

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 17:00:00 +0100

Entry examples from Linked Open Datasets on Garments from the Latgale Region, from right to left: Q142, Q180, Q179, Q181.

The first published dataset, Linked Open Datasets on Garments from the Latgale Region contains data on Latvian traditional shirts and skirts from the Latgale region in Eastern Latvia. The The female and male shirts, and the skirts in the dataset are handmade and were worn in the 19th century. They represent both festive and daily wear of the local female and male peasants. The shirts are stored at the National History Museum of Latvia and the Ethnographic Open-Air Museum of Latvia. The data contain information on the locality of their origin, their approximate date of creation with various precisions, the materials they are made of, and the way of their fabrication, as well as their purpose of wearing (festive or daily wear) and wearer’s ethnicity and gender. They also include the name of the museum each shirt is stored at, supplemented with its unique inventory number. Data on some sample shirts also include a photo of the shirt.

Check out the properties (relations) in the data model: ListProperties
See every entry in the database: All items