No source: created in electronic format.
Structured Prosopography provides a formal model for representing prosopography: a
branch of historical research that traditionally has focused on the identification
of people that appear in historical sources (Verboven et al. 2007). Thanks to
computing technologies, structured prosopography has succeeded in providing
historians with a mean to enhance their scholarly work and make it available
worldwide to a variety of academic and non academic users. Since the 1990s, KCL’s
Department of Digital Humanities (DDH) has been involved in the development of
structured prosopographical databases, and has had direct involvement in
Prosopographies of the Byzantine World (PBE and PBW)
Pre-digital print prosopographies presented its materials as narrative articles about the individuals it contains. Structured prosopography instead takes a more database-oriented approach as it focuses on isolating information fragments (usually, in textual form) that are relevant to the task of describing the life-events of a particular person. As a result, it is possible to quickly recollect such results in manifold ways using the logical query languages database systems make available.
In particular, DDH has been involved in the development of a general
‘factoid-oriented’ model of structure that although downplaying or eliminating
narratives about people, has to a large extent served the needs of these various
projects quite well. The structure formally identifies obvious items of interest:
Persons and Sources, and extends to related things like Offices or Places. In our
prosopographical model the Factoid is a central idea and
represents the spot in a primary source where something is said about one or more
persons. In other words, it links people to the information about them via spots in
primary sources that assert that information (Bradley & Short 2003).
In general, it is fair to say that the issue of representing prosopographical data to
the purpose of building large and efficient knowledge bases is no longer a critical
problem for digital humanities research to tackle. Thanks to more than twenty years
of research in this niche-area, a number of technical approaches such as the factoid one just mentioned have been discussed extensively
and thus can facilitate enormously the initial design and construction of a
structured back-end for a digital prosopographical project.
For that regards instead the visual rendering and final presentation of the
contents of a prosopography, the amount of existing research is considerably
smaller
The tabular format has the
advantage of offering a wealth of information in a clean and well-organized
interface, thus simplifying the task of finding what we are looking for during a
search. However, by combining all the information in a single view, this
approach also hides some of the key dimensions used by historians in order to
make sense of the materials at hand. For example,
such dimensions could be deriving from a spatio-historical, genealogical or
socio-political consideration of the data.
In other words, we acknowledged
that although the tabular format succeeds in creating a comprehensive and
condensed version of the information relevant for a search, it would also be
interesting to examine if we could present the same data in a more piecemeal
fashion, according to predefined pathways or views on the dataset that aim at making explicit some of
the coherence principles of the historical discourse.
We believe that this kind of approach could be desirable for both non-expert users (e.g., learners) – who could simultaneously access the data and get a feeling for the meaningful relations among them – and for experts alike (e.g., academic scholars) – who could be facilitated in the process of analyzing data within predefined dimensions, so to highlight patterns of interest that would be otherwise hard to spot.
With these ideas in mind we started to investigate the creation of innovative methods for presenting prosopographical data to users. For the moment these experiments have been developed in the context of a single prosopography, the ‘Paradox of Medieval Scotland’, but we reckon that they could be easily generalizable to other projects too, due to the intrinsic similarity of the approaches we used.
In particular, we have classified these exploratory tools into three broad categories:
The experiments can be accessed online at http://www.poms.ac.uk/db/labs/; we invite the reader to try them out so to better develop a critical understanding of their potential usefulness.
Although we are still in a very early stage in the development of such exploratory interfaces, we already had a number of enthusiastic early reviews from project partners and work colleagues. As a result of this initial response, and from the evolution of our thinking around these issues, we are currently refining some of these tools and also developing other and more specialized ones. For example, an interesting aspect we would like to explore further concerns the potential applicability of the approaches herewith presented within other prosopographical scenarios, such as the ones focusing on ancient and modern history. Furthermore, in order to gain more empirical evidence on the potential usefulness of these tools for historians, a more formal user-evaluation session involving both high-school students and academic scholars is being planned.
At the conference we intend to present a preliminary analysis of these results, together with a practical demonstration of the most successful prosopographical exploratory tools we developed.
Bateman, S., C. Gutwin, and M. Nacenta (2008). Seeing things
in the clouds: the effect of visual features on tag cloud selections. In HT ’08: Proceedings of the nineteenth ACM conference on
Hypertext and hypermedia. New York, NY, pp. 193-202.
Bradley, J., and H. Short (2003). Texts into databases: The
Evolving Field of New-style Prosopography. ACH/ALLC
conference, Athens, Georgia.
Lawrence, K. F., et al. (2010). Scanning Between the Lines:
The Search for the Semantic Story. Panel Session in Digital
Humanities 2010.
Mullholland, P., T. Collins, and Z. Zdrahal (2004). Story
Fountain: intelligent support for story research and exploration. In 9th International Conference on Intelligent User
Interface.
Murray, J. H. (1997). Hamlet on the
Holodeck. MIT Press.
Verboven, K., M. Carlier, and J. Dumolyn (2007). A Short
Manual to the Art of Prosopography. In K. S. B. Keats-Rohan (ed.), Prosopography Approaches and Applications A Handbook.
University of Oxford, Linacre College Unit for Prosopographical Research.
Wolff, A., P. Mullholland, and Z. Zdrahal (2004).
Scene-driver: a narrative-driven game architecture reusing broadcast animation
content. In ACM SIGCHI International Conference on Advances in
computer entertainment technology.