Artefacts as Material Sources of Traditional Clothing in Riga During the 18th and 19th Centuries (Data Description)

Artefacts as Material Sources of Traditional Clothing in Riga During the 18th and 19th Centuries Data Description for TextileBase Ieva Pigozne; Daniel Antal 2025 Version 1.0; DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17009807 1 Try TextileBase: https://reprexbase.eu/textilebase/ Abstract Years of creation: 2024–2025. Institution: University of Latvia, Faculty of Humanities, Institute of Latvian History. Funding: Grant “Contextualization of Traditional Clothing: Reassessing the Connection Between Riga and Latgale” (LU-BA-PG-2024/1-0023), Recovery and Resilience Facility project “Internal and External Consolidation of the University of Latvia” (5.2.1.1.i.0/2/24/I/CFLA/007). Infrastructure provenance: The data sharing space system underlying TextileBase 1 —from its technical architecture to its ontological design—was originally developed for the Open Music Observatory in the context of the Open Music Europe (OpenMusE) project. TextileBase was subsequently prototyped as an exploitation pathway to adapt and extend these results for cultural heritage and textile research, demonstrating their usability beyond the music domain [Open Music Europe 2023]. Keywords: dress history, Latvia, Riga, digital humanities, research data, data curation, knowledge base Dataset: Ieva Pigozne (2025). Artefacts as Material Sources of Traditional Clothing in Riga During the 18th and 19th Centuries. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.16995523. Related dataset about secondary sources: Ieva Pigozne (2025): Visual and Written Sources on Traditional Clothing in Riga During the 18th and 19th Centuries, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.16995555. 1 Antal, D – Pigozne, I. (2025). Linking Garments to Knowledge: TextileBase as an Interdisciplinary Graph for Dress and Textile Research. Preprint: 10.5281/zenodo.16914850 [Unpublished preprint, please cite the final text and page numbering in Culture Crossroads (Vol.28) in 2025, expected publication Oct 2025 https://culturecrossroads.lv/] TextileBase is created with ReprexBase, a system developed in the Open Music Europe Horizon Europe Research and Innovation Action (Open Music Europe (OpenMusE) – An Open, Scalable, Data-to-Policy Pipeline for European Music Ecosystems. Available: https://doi.org/10.3030/101095295) for the purpose of managing data about current and heritage music, musicians, and music-related information. It is based around the open source Wikibase database management system with a data sharing space configuration and a special data mode. More information about the system and its original use can be found in the bibliography. 2 Try TextileBase: https://reprexbase.eu/textilebase/ Data Description This open linked dataset brings together all known surviving material artefacts related to traditional clothing in Riga. These items, though numbering only a few, provide rare material evidence (Taylor 2015: 3-23) of garments once worn by the city’s common people. Traditional clothing is defined here as garments and accessories characteristic of traditional dress (in contrast to the more cosmopolitan European urban fashions worn by townspeople) (Welters and Lillethun 2018: 163-168). The data paper and the dataset of material sources on the traditional clothing of common people in Riga was created within the grant “Contextualization of Traditional Clothing: Reassessing the Connection Between Riga and Latgale” (LU-BA-PG-2024/1-0023) and financed by the Recovery and Resilience Facility project “Internal and External Consolidation of the University of Latvia” (5.2.1.1.i.0/2/24/I/CFLA/007). Going back in time before the second half of the 19th century, only a very small number traditional clothing artefacts are known to have survived in Riga. The wearing of traditional dress in the city disappeared quite early, around the 1840s. Interest in collecting and preserving such garments for museums began only at the end of the nineteenth century (Ķikuts 2016), by which time most of the evidence had already been lost. The few surviving items – a jacket, two skirts, an apron, and two caps in the collection of the National History Museum of Latvia as well as three different wooden clogs in the collection of the Museum of the History of Riga and Navigation – were collected in Riga or its immediate surroundings and represent a period from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. The twentieth century, although outside the chronological scope of our data collection, may be relevant in the case of the wooden clogs, whose dating is very broad and imprecise: from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century. The garments, however, are all dated to the nineteenth century, with the red woollen women’s jacket belonging to the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. Evidence of traditional dress in Riga was never collected systematically, since at the time when such collecting took place, the main interest lay in traditional clothing from the Latvian countryside. This was because Latvian identity was being constructed primarily based on peasant traditions and rural cultural heritage (Ķikuts 2016). To partly compensate for the scarcity of surviving artefacts, the dataset also includes nine items discovered in archaeological excavations in the territory of Old Riga, which have survived in relatively complete form and clearly represent garments that were part of traditional 3 Try TextileBase: https://reprexbase.eu/textilebase/ dress. These include several knitted stockings, a mitten, a glove, a brass crown, as well as two men’s hats, all unearthed in excavation sites located in present-day Old Riga and dated to the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The excavations were carried out by archaeologists Viktorija Bebre and Andris Caune (Bebre and Caune 1990; Bebre 2004). Of these artefacts, only the crown can be identified as a female accessory, most likely worn by an unmarried young woman, while the two hats were worn by men. The wearers of the knitted stockings, mitten, and glove remain unknown. Description of detail TextileBase follows the Wikibase data model, in which each entity is represented as an item (a document in a document-oriented database). Each item contains a modular dataset: a self-contained set of knowledge statements that describe everything currently known about a given visual or textual source. In archival or museological terms, our “level of description” is the artefact. It would be possible to record details (for example, describe parts of a garment, or its observed damages due to wear and tear over the centuries), but this was not the aim of this data collection. From the perspective of Wikibase, however, all of these are technically equivalent, therefore researchers can themselves suggest more detailed descriptions. The “level of description” is thus not a limitation of the data model but a decision in the curatorial practice. The dataset was created on the TextileBase platform (https://reprexbase.eu/textilebase) allowing each artefact a separate entry with its own label and description and accompanying linked data. For each artefact included in the dataset, the following information is provided: ● the holding museum ● inventory number, ● place of collection or excavation, ● dating, ● wearer (if known), ● the material(s) from which it was made. Often a photograph gives more information to the textile researcher than these data points. We have included in our dataset images from the Museum of the History of Riga and Navigation. Unfortunately, the National History Museum of Latvia does not support photographs of artefacts in its collection to be published online. All the items are grouped into the collection Traditional Clothing in Riga Collection (TXB:Q764) and dataset Artefacts as material sources of traditional clothing in Riga 4 Try TextileBase: https://reprexbase.eu/textilebase/ during the 18th and 19th centuries (TXB:Q763) that is a time-stamped snapshot (2025) of the collection, restricted to sources related to Riga. This dataset has a DOI (10.5281/zenodo.16995523) and includes 18 artefacts (TXB:Q770–Q787). In this way, each item is simultaneously: ● a member of the collection (the ongoing research corpus), and ● a member of the published dataset (the frozen subset cited here). This approach ensures maximum granularity, reusability, and citation stability, while preserving interoperability between human-readable description and machine-readable modular datasets. Individual entries are listed in the Annex by their label, each linked to its corresponding record in TextileBase, where the full description can be conveniently accessed. Multimodality and copyright status of images The artefacts that we describe usually predate intellectual property law, and therefore no restriction on depicting their design, surface patterns or outlook is present. At the time of creation there was no modern copyright law in the Russian Empire; the first provisions in that sense arrived with the 1828 Statute on Censorship, and a comprehensive Copyright Act followed in 1911. We do not see any reasons why photographic images of the artefacts could not be included in our dataset. Contemporary photographs of the artefacts are available, which visually describe them as they can be seen in the 21st century. We have included in our dataset images from the Museum of the History of Riga and Navigation. These photographs are protected by institutional copyrights, and they can be used with attribution given to the museum together with the inventory number of the artefact. Unfortunately, the National History Museum of Latvia does not support photographs of artefacts in its collection to be published online, regardless of their copyright status. Data structure In developing this dataset within TextileBase, we adopted a Wikibase data model that follows established semantic patterns from multiple standards. For bibliographic and textual interoperability, we draw on DCTERMS; for museum collections, on CIDOC-CRM; for archival records, on Records in Context (RiC); and for provenance, on PROV-O. We also synchronize with globally used authorities such as GeoNames for geographical reference identification and the Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) for classification. This combination strikes a balance between ease of use for researchers, interoperability across disciplines, and 5 Try TextileBase: https://reprexbase.eu/textilebase/ the possibility of importing from and exporting to large GLAM systems. For further details, please refer to our forthcoming publication (currently available in preprint 2 ). The dating of the object is made with the has time property, by default, with the precision of a year precision, like 1842. In the case of material sources, garments, usually such precise dating is not available. When have only approximate dating, for example, 1820-1850, the has time property is qualified with a start time (1820) and end time (1850) qualifiers. The start time qualifier property in this case refers the earliest like date, and the end time to the latest. The actual date entered the database is the midpoint of the time interval with a decade or a century precision mark. In a wide interval like 1820-1850, the entered number is 1835 displayed with a century precision, i.e., 19th century. The dating, if newer sources or evidence will allow more precise dating, can be later narrowed to decade, year, or in rare cases, a creation or collection day precision. Regarding material sources, several important times and time intervals can relate to an artefact: the date of creation, the time period of use, the time of abandoning or collection, the time of discovery in the case of archaeological finds. TextileBase uses the has time property with qualifiers like date of creation, or date of collection. One artefact’s provenance may be described with several points in time or time intervals. When using these resources, please always cite: Ieva Pigozne (2025). Artefacts as Material Sources of Traditional Clothing in Riga During the 18th and 19th Centuries. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.16995523. References Antal, D. (2023). The planned Slovak Comprehensive Music Database. Available: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10392759 Antal, D. (2024). A szlovák adatkicserélési tér magyarországi föderációjának lehetőségei [Opportunities for the Federation of the Slovak Data Exchange Space in Hungary]. HUNGARNET Egyesület. Available: https://doi.org/10.31915/NWS.2024.25 2 Antal, D., & Pigozne, I. (2025). Linking Garments to Knowledge: TextileBase as an Interdisciplinary Graph for Dress and Textile Research. In Culture Crossroads (Preprint). TextileBase. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16914850. You can also visit our presentations Antal, D., Pigozne, I., Gábor, K., & Fredercio, A. (2025). TextileBase: Introduction. TextileBase Seminars 1, National Laboratory for Digital Humanities, ELTE, Budapest. TextileBase. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16937140 6 Try TextileBase: https://reprexbase.eu/textilebase/ Antal, D., & Pigozne, I. (2025). Linking Garments to Knowledge: TextileBase as an Interdisciplinary Graph for Dress and Textile Research. In Culture Crossroads (Preprint). TextileBase. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16914850 Antal, D., Pigozne, I., Gábor, K., & Federcio, A. (2025). TextileBase: Introduction. TextileBase Seminars 1, National Laboratory for Digital Humanities, ELTE, Budapest. TextileBase. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16937140 Archives Expert Group on Archival Description, I.C. on. (2023). Records in Contexts– Conceptual Model. Available: https://www.ica.org/app/uploads/2023/12/RiC-CM-1.0.pdf (viewed: 23.01.2025.) Art & Architecture Thesaurus. The Getty Research Institute. Available: https://www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabularies/aat (Viewed: 09.02.2025.) Bebre, Viktorija and Caune, Andris. 1990. Arheoloģiskie pētījumi aizbērtajā Rīdziņas gultnē, Daugavas ielā 33 [Archaeological Investigations in the Backfilled Bed of the Rīdziņa River, 33 Daugava Street]. Zinātniskās atskaites sesijas materiāli par arheologu un etnogrāfu 1988. un 1989. gada pētījumu rezultātiem. Arheoloģija. Rīga: Zinātne. 47.-52. lpp. Bebre, Viktorija. 2004. Arheoloģiskā uzraudzība Rīgā, Vaļņu ielā [Archaeological Supervision on Vaļņu Street in Riga]. Arheologu pētījumi Latvijā 2002. un 2003. gadā. Rīga: Latvijas vēstures institūta apgāds. 85.-88. lpp. Bekiari, C., Bruseke, G., Canning, E., Doerr, M., Michon, P., Ore, C.-E., Stead, S., Athanasios, V. (Eds.) (2024). Definition of the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model. Available: https://cidoc-crm.org//sites/default/files/cidoc_crm_version_7.2.4.pdf (viewed: 25.01.2025.) Dublin Core. (2020). DCMI Metadata Terms. Available: https://www.dublincore.org/specifications/dublin-core/dcmi-terms/2020-01-20/ (viewed: 11.01.2025.) GeoNames. Available: https://www.geonames.org/ (viewed: 09.02.2025.) Gil, Y., Miles, S., Belhajjame, K., Deus, H., Garijo, D., Klyne, G., Missier, P., SoilandReyes, S., Zednik, S. (2013). Prov model primer. W3C working group note. Available: https://www.w3.org/TR/prov-primer/ (viewed: 04.12.2024.) Ķikuts, Toms. 2016. 1896. gada Latviešu etnogrāfiskā izstāde - laikmeta lieciniece [ The Latvian Ethnographic Exhibition of 1896 – Witness to an Era. Latviešu etnogrāfiskā izstāde 1896 = Latvian Ethnographic Exhibition 1896]. Rīga: Neputns. pp. 17–87. Lebo, T., Sahoo, S., McGuinness, D., Belhajjame, K., Cheney, J., Corsar, D., Garijo, D., Soiland-Reyes, S., Zednik, S., Zhao, J. (2013). PROV-o: The PROV ontology. W3C 7 Try TextileBase: https://reprexbase.eu/textilebase/ recommendation. Available: https://www.w3.org/TR/2013/REC-prov-o-20130430/ (viewed: 17.12.2024.) Open Music Europe. (2023). Open Music Europe (OpenMusE) – An Open, Scalable, Data-to-Policy Pipeline for European Music Ecosystems. Available: https://doi.org/10.3030/101095295 Pfeiffer, M., Gayo, J.E.L. (2021). Representing CIDOC-CRM in Wikibase for the Luxembourg Shared Authority File. Available: https://swib.org/swib21/slides/05-03-gayo.pdf (viewed: 18.12.2024.) SEMIC 2020. (2020). Providing Sustainable Data Services through Wikibase and Wikidata. Available: https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/sites/default/files/custompage/attachment/2020-11/Parallel-track-4_B-Fischer_J-Thill_A-Angjeli%20final%20ppt.pdf (viewed: 09.01.2025.) Taylor, Lou. 2015. The Study of Dress History. Manchester: Manchester University Press. TextileBase. Available: https://reprexbase.eu/textilebase (Viewed: 10.08.2025.) Welters, Linda and Lillethun, Abby. 2018. Fashion History. A Global View. London: Bloomsbury Academic. 8 Try TextileBase: https://reprexbase.eu/textilebase/ Annex For example, TXB:Q771 resolves to https://reprexbase.eu/textilebase/Item:Q771. Researchers who wish to fetch the data for reuse in their own systems can retrieve the same entity in multiple serializations by changing the URL to: • https://reprexbase.eu/textilebase/Special:EntityData/Q771.ttl for Turtle, • https://reprexbase.eu/textilebase/Special:EntityData/Q771.nt for N-Triples, • https://reprexbase.eu/textilebase/Special:EntityData/Q771.rdf for RDF/XML, • https://reprexbase.eu/textilebase/Special:EntityData/Q771.jsonld for JSON-LD, or • https://reprexbase.eu/textilebase/Special:EntityData/Q771.json for JSON. Entry Label txb:Q770 wooden clogs (VRVM 52204) txb:Q771 leather clog with wooden soles (VRVM 88405) txb:Q772 wooden clogs (VRVM 91145) txb:Q773 crown of brass (VRVM 41647) txb:Q774 woollen stocking (VRVM 185483/1) txb:Q775 mitten (VRVM 185483/5) txb:Q776 woollen stocking (VRVM 185483/11) txb:Q777 woollen stocking (VRVM 189074/2)