The Lord Mayor's Costume Balls in Sydney in 1857 and 1879 is a prototype of a project by an interdisciplinary research team, bringing together a domain expert in history, a computer scientist, and a Linked Data methodologist.

At the core of our project sit two lists of guests and their costumes as recorded in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1857 and another in 1879. Both lists are availabe as a .CSV download from our Data page. The original PDFs and the OCR-generated transcripts are availabe from Trove, the digital repository of the National Library of Australia.

We also bring in infomation from external sources such as

• The Australian Dictionary of Biography

This prototype acts as a proof-of-concept, and illustrates the ways in which digital and computational tools such as Linked Data can be used to support and diversify scholarship in the Humanities.

The Lord Mayor's Costume Balls in Sydney in 1857 and 1879 project data is made available under the Creatice Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0). For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/au/.