Thread by @tigerlilyrocks

Attending a really exciting @BritishAcademy workshop, 'Linking Data in Prosopography: Late Antique, Byzantine and Early Modern Studies', with no formal presentations and discussions collaboratively recorded on a Google doc! #Networks #Prosopography #Twitterstorians @ERC_CONNEC

Beginning with Charlotte Rouche raising issues of categorisation of data models, definitions of prosopography, and reconciling data collection with scepticism - do you include Zeus/Jesus in your database? #LinkedData

As a user you need to know what you're not going to find in a prosopographical database; how do you define the boundaries, who do you include and exclude, on what basis? Discussing Clergy of the Church of England Database: theclergydatabase.org.uk

#LinkedData Connecting Late Antiquities Project with @RichardAFlower, a massive and long-term aim to create a comprehensive? prosopographical database of the Later Roman Empire

#LinkedData Early Modern Letters Online Database (emlo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk), moving beyond discrete evidence-base of letters as a starting point to ties to actors associated with letters; issues = disambiguation and utility of the data. Poorly documented actors = majority

#LinkedData Aspirationally not want exclusive focus on letters; to envisage a proper prosopographical system - take data from other sources of evidence, move beyond sender, recipient and mentioned categories

30 participants attending the workshop, 8 women and 22 men; are men more interested in #LinkedData #Networks #Prosopography?

Prosopographical project making high-quality full text of one of the oldest newspapers in the world available, the Wien[n]erisches Diarium Digital; all actors listed died within city of Vienna
@ACDH_OeAW

#LinkedData verbs or nouns? Do you identify actors according to their active, formal roles or more passively according to their existence? Raises issues of inclusivity and reaffirming existing biases in scholarship, particularly around gender and elitism

#LinkedData Size of database determines approach: number of actors in 100s is manageable on an individual basis; larger data models necessitate automated data scanning

#LInkedData Inclusion in a database not always determined by citizenship; impact on Austrian history was enough to include Gavrilo Princip, the assassinator of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, in the Austrian Biographical Dictionary (ÖBL) @ACDH_OeAW

1600 = year that men have the greatest representation in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: oxforddnb.com

#LinkedData Rouche: the most important people are the least interesting #Prosopography

#LinkedData Will Garrood's recently completed PhD on a factoid prosopography for the ecclesiastical historian Socrates Scholasticus sounds fascinating! He's categorised all the people, living, dead, referred to, anonymous

#LinkedData Claire Sotinel discussing Prosopographie chrétienne du Bas-Empire #PCBE
'club' - contributed to Italie volume, 20th century project, optimistic, create a complete and definitive product, very slow work

#LinkedData #PCBE volumes on Africa Italy Gaul published, Christian world structured by adminitrative divisions that are Roman not clerical. All people are included that had an impact on the development of Christianity 3-6 centuries CE

#LinkedData #PCBE not just technical or institutional details. Anonymi not included for practical reasons. Project begun in pre-computer world, too difficult to manage anonymous people.

#LinkedData #PCBE Popes included only before they became popes. No emperors, no Augustine or Ambrose!!! Their relations are included, but they do not have dedicated entries - wealth of information elsewhere

#LinkedData #PCBE Every entry aims to be as complete as possible, lots of detail, not just about Christianity/the life of the church. Lots of people of lesser importance like slaves. Selection is haphazard, and doesn't reflect structure of Christian society.

#LinkedData #PCBE Entries are connected together - give reference to other PCBE entries/volumes and Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire #PRLE.
2000 people+ for Italie. Geographical divisions - important.

#LinkedData #PCBE Started in early 1970s, teams are not all the same, not systematic. Volume on Africa - written in literary way, influences result. Asia - one person author - more coherent. Hard to extract data from #PCBE - the authors know where the data is.

#LinkedData #PCBE Sylvain Destephen wrote vol. 3 of PCBE alone. Collected 12,000 entries. Vol. on Iberian peninsula in Spanish almost finished. Volume for Pontius, eastern half of Asia minor, only clerics, lay people excluded.

#LinkedData #PCBE Volume on Balkan provinces of Later Roman Empire being written at Lille. Patriarchate of Jerusalem in the works. Exciting prosopographical times!

#LinkedData disambiguation & reconciliation of data: who is responsible for these decisions? Eds may have part. useful contributions to make; leaving entries you suspect as being the same (ie. two Johns of Nicopolis) separate better than uniting them on insufficient grounds

#LinkedData Disambiguation between named person and anonymous - lack of certainty to link actors - problematic

#LinkedData Problem of disambiguation solved through annotation? Tension in results - quality vs. coverage/quantity

#LinkedData Conflation of actors in past scholarship and history - pseudo-Chrysostom may be several different people

#LinkedData Using #Wikidata in databases - more leeway for recording data than in @Wikipedia - less contested

#LinkedData #Wikidata locations are stable, but people are much more complicated. Who is responsible for updating/maintaining data, especially when information is modified?

#LinkedData access to databases; who has permission to edit? Incorporating voluntary resources, incorporating feedback

#LinkedData Every time you have to re-engineer your system it becomes more unstable; have to find best methodologies for integrating information as well as recognising authorship

#LinkedData Editing, commenting and reviewing - three different systems in Syriac Biographical Dictionary (syriaca.org/persons/)

#LinkedData Demonstrable editorial process is important in the construction of databases - peer-reviewed database important for the contributions of students and #ECR

#LinkedData Issue of categorisation very important if, for example, someone wants to know about astronomers in your database; the authority has had to already decide what an astronomer is and who can be categorised as one

#LinkedData Next we're talking about the data competence: the quality of evidence, approximate dating, inferred knowledge, scraps of evidence, uncertainty, in conflict with other evidence or critical interpretations

#LinkedData 'In commission' - euphemism for the author is still alive!

#LinkedData Long-term sustainability of digital projects - what happens when the funding runs out?

#LinkedData to run network analytics without including major nodes would be pointless, but constructing databases with high-level/visible actors is a lot of work that risks duplication

#LinkedData #PCBE "naive" approach, gives "pure" information that can be interpreted, does not cite secondary sources

We're kicking off the second the @BritishAcademy workshop, 'Linking Data in Prosopography: Late Antique, Byzantine and Early Modern Studies', with @RichardAFlower introducing us to Enrichment and Exchange #Networks #Prosopography #Twitterstorians @ERC_CONNEC

#LinkedData What standard referencing systems (ie. text abbreviations or Pleiades or GeoNames URIs) do you incorporate in your data? #WikiData @PleiadesProject #EMPlaces gazateer for all early modern historians under-developement #EarlyModern

#LinkedData Geographic referencing systems: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names Online: getty.edu/research/tools…

#LinkedData Early Modern Places: github.com/culturesofknow…
"Early Modern Places (EM Places) is a collaboratively curated, historical geo-gazetteer for the sixteenth- to eighteenth-century under development by the Cultures of Knowledge project at Oxford University"

#LinkedData Sources and abbreviations; opportunities to create new and consistent referencing systems in the construction of prosopographical databases

#LinkedData Julia Hillner @WritingHelena Abbreviations often used as a form of gatekeeping; without the constraints space online should we be using abbreviations?

#LinkedData for #LateAntiqueStorians L’Année philologique (APh) has a useful list of abbreviations, but it doesn't include everything, and isn't used universally @RichardAFlower

#LinkedData Trismegistos - good at reconciling slight differences in data input: trismegistos.org. "An interdisciplinary portal of papyrological and epigraphical resources formerly Egypt and the Nile valley (800 BC-AD 800), now expanding to the Ancient World in general"

#LinkedData We're discussing A LOT of abbreviations; how can we be inclusive if abbreviations prevent people from entering a field? Figuring out collaboratively how to make our own abbreviations comprehensible...to each other!

#LinkedData What kinds of linking beyond the digital are useful? What is connecting, and what does it involve? Linking to disambiguate, enriching the record by extracting data, making your data findable

#LinkedData Abbreviations in Liddell-Scott-Jones Greek-English Lexicon: stephanus.tlg.uci.edu/lsj/#eid=1

#LinkedData The potential for linking data through ie. model of Pelagios @PelagiosNetwork with Leif Isaksen. Pelagios - originally classical antiquity, now any period

#LinkedData Leif Isaksen, Pelagios: Identify and make named entities; use your data in other tools or connect to other data on the web, without needing to learn code

#LinkedData Leif Isaksen and Pelagios freely available platform, 3700 people registered as users. Each user has their own workspace with 200mb, upload documents, text, images, data tables in CSV format

#LinkedData Leif Isaksen: uploaded the Bordeaux Itinerary/The Itinerarium Burdigalense ca. 334 CE (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itinerari…). Text has been machine-read and places identified and tagged with annotated references

#LinkedData Leif Isaksen: Pelagios - add comments, tags, and do basic visualisations. Also a social element - able to make document publicly available. Have team of people editing same document simultaneously

#LinkedData Leif Isaksen: Peripleo - showing example of how tetradrachm coins are located on a map, can be filtered according to time; references to crocodiles, tagged on a map - mainly Egypt, Herodotus

#LinkedData @palaeofuturist talking SNAP:DRGN, like Pelagios but for people: snapdrgn.net

#LinkedData break-out groups!

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