Conceptual Modeling of Prosopographic Databases Integrating Quality Dimensions

International audienceProsopographic databases, which allow the study of social groups through their bibliography, are used today by a significant number of historians. Computerization has allowed intensive and large-scale exploitation of these databases. The modeling of these proposopographic databases has given rise to several data models. An important problem is to ensure a level of quality of the stored information. In this article , we propose a generic data model allowing to describe most of the existing prosopographic databases and to enrich them by integrating several quality concepts such as uncertainty, reliability, accuracy or completeness

A Social Network of the Prosopography of the Neo-Assyrian Empire

The dataset is a social network of over 17,000 individuals who lived during the so-called Neo-Assyrian period of Mesopotamian history, primarily in the eighth and seventh centuries BCE. The undirected network of individuals connected by co-occurrences in cuneiform documents was semi-automatically extracted from the Prosopography of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. In addition to two weighted versions of the one-mode co-occurrence network, the dataset also contains a two-mode person-text network and rich metadata for each individual. For the first time, the dataset allows large-scale computational analysis of social structures in the Assyrian Empire. The data is primarily stored as plain text and CSV files, inviting scholars to further expand and enrich it. The scripts and files used for creating and standardizing the data are also available in the Zenodo repository.Peer reviewe

On Making in the Digital Humanities

On Making in the Digital Humanities fills a gap in our understanding of digital humanities projects and craft by exploring the processes of making as much as the products that arise from it. The volume draws focus to the interwoven layers of human and technological textures that constitute digital humanities scholarship. To do this, it assembles a group of well-known, experienced and emerging scholars in the digital humanities to reflect on various forms of making (we privilege here the creative and applied side of the digital humanities). The volume honours the work of John Bradley, as it is totemic of a practice of making that is deeply informed by critical perspectives. A special chapter also honours the profound contributions that this volume’s co-editor, Stéfan Sinclair, made to the creative, applied and intellectual praxis of making and the digital humanities. Stéfan Sinclair passed away on 6 August 2020. The chapters gathered here are individually important, but together provide a very human view on what it is to do the digital humanities, in the past, present and future. This book will accordingly be of interest to researchers, teachers and students of the digital humanities; creative humanities, including maker spaces and culture; information studies; the history of computing and technology; and the history of science and the humanities

The role of humanities computing: experiences and challenges

Dieser Beitrag wurde anlässlich des dreißigjährigen Bestehens der Abteilung Literarische und Dokumentarische Datenverarbeitung an der Universität Tübingen verfasst. Er gibt einen Überblick über die Entwicklung der Datenverarbeitung auf dem Gebiet der Geisteswissenschaften in diesem Zeitraum. Zunächst werden Erfahrungen mit der Datenverarbeitung in den Geisteswissenschaften referiert und aktuelle Entwicklungen auf diesem Gebiet vorgestellt. Dann werden Herausforderungen diskutiert, mit denen sich die Datenverarbeitung in den Geisteswissenschaften konfrontiert sieht. Abschließend stellt der Verfasser die Bedeutung der Datenverarbeitung in den Geisteswissenschaften in den kommenden Jahren aus seiner Sicht dar. (ICEÜbers)'Due to the celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of the Department for Literary and Documentary Data Processing in Tuebingen this article is written. It gives an overview of humanities computing developments since the formation of this Research-Department. The paper is divided into three parts. First, the experiences in humanities computing are reviewed. For three purposes the author points out various aspects of the development and exploitation of scholarly materials using computers, considering some of the current work to create new tools for research. This chapter is followed by the discussion of some of the key challenges of this century, by that humanities computing and the scholarship, of which it is a part, are faced with. Finally, the author gives a summary of what in his opinion would be the key rotes of humanities computing in the future.' (author's abstract

Berkeley Prosopography Services: Building Research Communities and Restoring Ancient Communities through Digital Tools

Berkeley Prosopography Service (BPS) is an innovative open-source digital tool and service that automatically extracts prosopographic data from TEI-encoded text and generates visualizations of the dynamic social networks contained in the text corpora. Filters allow researchers to vary search parameters to consider alternative or hypothetical scenarios such as the impact of individuals and conditions on social and economic relationships. BPS provides users with individual workspaces for research, assessment and probabilistic modelling, while corpus administrators maintain data integrity. During the grant period, BPS, the first independent tool and service to be incorporated into the international Cuneiform Digital Library consortium, will undergo beta-testing of additional text corpora to confirm the reliability and generalizability of its tools for widespread use in the broad community of prosopographers

Toward an Interactive Directory for Norfolk, Nebraska: 1899-1900

We describe steps toward an interactive directory for the town of Norfolk, Nebraska for the years 1899 and 1900. This directory would extend the traditional city directory by including a wider range of entities being described, much richer information about the entities mentioned and linkages to mentions of the entities in material such as digitized historical newspapers. Such a directory would be useful to readers who browse the historical newspapers by providing structured summaries of the entities mentioned. We describe the occurrence of entities in two years of the Norfolk Weekly News, focusing on several individuals to better understand the types of information which can be gleaned from historical newspapers and other historical materials. We also describe a prototype program which coordinates information about entities from the traditional city directories, the federal census, and from newspapers. We discuss the structured coding for these entities, noting that richer coding would increasingly include descriptions of events and scenarios. We propose that rich content about individuals and communities could eventually be modeled with agents and woven into historical narratives

Visual Analysis of Engineers' Biographies and Engineering Branches

The Prosopographic Database of German Engineers 1825–1970 contains a multitude of biographical information. Given a set of research interests by collaborating historians, this paper discusses the steps undertaken (1) to extract engineering subjects from unstructured text entries in the database accompanied with geospatial and temporal information, (2) to adapt existing visual representations to facilitate exploratory analyses, and (3) to design a visual interface to support the interactive composition of engineering branches from engineering subjects to enable the comparative analysis of geospatial-temporal developments in engineering. Usage scenarios outline the benefit of the proposed visualizations for modern prosopography research

A new approach for the construction of historical databases—NoSQL Document-oriented databases: the example of AtlantoCracies

This article proposes, and justifies, the use of the Document-oriented databases as a flexible, easy to use, and powerful digital tool in the field of historical research. First, the reasons that have made relational databases the predominant instrument among historians are studied, while detailing the problems involved in their use. Next, the way in which historians have tried to face these problems by using other digital tools is explained, as well as the limitations that such use entails. Through a case study—that of European aristocratic networks in early modern times—it is shown, however, that Document-oriented databases, present notable advantages and have greater explanatory power for the historian’s work. Thanks to their flexibility, they are better adapted to the often-unpredictable nature of historical sources without diminishing their ease of use or their analytical potential.Junta de Andalucía UPO-1264973Junta de Andalucía HUM 100

The Ingenious Crowd�: A Critical Prosopography of British Inventors, 1650-1850

simulation, models

Modeling Historical Social Networks Databases

Historical social networks are analyzed using prosopographical methods. Prosopography is a branch of historical research that focuses on the iden-tification of social networks that appear in historical sources. It aims to represent and to interpret histori-cal data, sourced from texts. Conceptual modeling imparts the capability to process these large data sets. This paper outlines a conceptual approach to design-ing a prosopographical database encompassing un-certainty. Our contribution is threefold: i) a generic certainty-based prosopographical conceptual model; ii) two meta-models with a mapping between them; iii) an illustrative example generating a customized pros-opographical relational model. Unlike past ap-proaches, our design process helps us to integrate disparate points of view as expressed in the proso-pography community. We apply our approach to the prosopographical database Studium Parisiense dedi-cated to members of Paris schools and university be-tween the twelfth and sixteenth centuries. This instan-tiation validates the usefulness of our approach