After working on many digital humanities projects over the past decade, I have noticed that many grapple with a few similar, persistent problems. The most widespread is how to store, sort, and display uncertain, partial, or otherwise incomplete dates. This issue also frequently affects datasets in libraries, museums, and archives.

The EDTF (Extended Date/Time Format) specification helps humanities researchers tackle this problem, and the python-edtf library is an open-source Python implementation of that specification. In collaboration with the package’s maintainers, The Interaction Consortium, I recently spent substantial time and effort to upgrade python-edtf for use in Mapping Color in History. I wrote a guest post on their blog about the process – check it out here.