Show HN: The Codex – a graph database project for the digital humanities

In 2015 I quit my full-time job as an ASP.NET developer to build what I think of as an &quot;atlas of history&quot; for the Italian Renaissance. It is a semantic-web style database build in Neo4j, .NET MVC, and KnockoutJS, and is an attempt to build a map of historical events and personalities for the digital humanities.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;the-codex.net" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;the-codex.net</a><p>I am currently the sole developer, product designer, and researcher on the project -- but I am looking for collaborators who would be willing to help me take this further.<p>As an &quot;atlas of history&quot; is a broad concept I decided to give the project clarity by focusing primary source documents from the Italian Renaissance. The two main sources at present are the &#x27;Florentine Diary&#x27; of Luca Landucci and the letters of Michelangelo. I have entered about 40 years worth of entries from Landucci&#x27;s diary and a good portion of Michelangelo&#x27;s early letters from his Roman period. In the process I have added hundreds of historical personalities, places, artworks, etc., in order to give the user real data to work with. I have also built various screens with data visualisation tools to mine the historical events. And of course I have built an extensive back-end for managing the data and relationships.<p>Is anyone interested in helping me out? I&#x27;d love input from anyone with an interest in art history and graphic design, or data visualisation tool, Neo4j, or anyone who wants to help me research and enter data.<p>Feel free to email me any time at: iian.d.neill@gmail.com<p>In the meantime, why not check out the Control Panel on Leonardo da Vinci&#x27;s dataset. Clicking any links in the text will load the datasets for those entities; or you can search for them by name. Why not try adding Michelangelo&#x27;s dataset to the mix? You can then switch between the three data-vis modes at the bottom, fiddle with the date filters, etc.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;the-codex.net&#x2F;Time&#x2F;ControlPanel" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;the-codex.net&#x2F;Time&#x2F;ControlPanel</a><p>Many thanks, Iian

Hi Iian, great work!<p>I built recruitment CRM with cached 1,000,000+ nodes and can imagine how much time and efforts you invested in your project.<p>I assume that .NET MVC and KnockoutJS was your first choice as you get used to it ... and it&#x27;s fine.<p>I personally found a lot of frustration dealing with Neo4J full-text search in multiple languages English, Russian and Japanese. There was no clear guideline on Lucene integration at the time.<p>How is your experience with Neo4J? Do you have to sync Neo4J data with traditional databases like M$ SQL?<p>Do you want to make your project as community efforts or see it as potential business?<p>The last question is much more important. I assume that a lot of developers won&#x27;t be excited about .NET or KnockoutJS staff, however they might consider to share some crawling data, D3.js graph visualizations code, etc with you.

I also recorded a screenshare presentation of how The Codex works:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=_R0ESfLBuHo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=_R0ESfLBuHo</a>

Hey, Iian. Not sure if this will be useful to you, but you might consider checking out <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;endlessorigins.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;endlessorigins.com&#x2F;</a> (the largest structured collection of human events, available for download as a single TSV file). And good luck with your project! :)