Silk purses and sow's ears: can structured data deal with historical sources?

A highly structured representation of materials have been largely neglected by historians as a way to explore historical sources in part because the textual nature of the sources often seems to preclude a structured representation. This paper proposes a place for them in the historian's toolkit and explores through a few examples how, as a way to formally express an historical interpretation of a body of material, they provide a mechanism to potentially enrich the exploration and development of an historian's interpretation of that material. Highly structured data exhibits a kind of classical clarity of approach that does not fit well with current postmodern and post-Enlightenment trends in the humanities, and this article touches on these issues, and suggests a few approaches to them.