Modelling the Prosopography of the Royal Portuguese Court in the Sixteenth Century

The poster will describe the digital component of the
research project developed in the course of my PhD in
Digital Humanities at King’s College London.
The project features a prosopographical study of the high
officials of the Royal Court during the reign of John III,
king of Portugal (1521-1557). The poster will demonstrate
how a relational model was used for that purpose:
the research aims at identifying a particular group of
people, detecting their socio-economic characteristics,
and uncovering their patterns of behaviour in the context
of early modern court politics.
Despite being a small country, in the sixteenth century
Portugal possessed a large royal court. I am interested
in the human configuration of this structure; who are
the men who govern the kingdom and surround the
king? This question can be addressed through an analysis
of their offices and of their social and economical
background. A further analysis of the nature of the relationship
between these actors and their (collective or
individual) relationship with the king will also provide
insights on the nature of influence and the negotiation of
power in royal courts during the Renaissance.
The ultimate aim of the project is to publish an online
version of the database, which will make it available to
other researchers as well as the general public. However,
this poster will describe my research rather than focus on
the implementation of that database.
The use of relational databases for prosopographical
purposes has been a recurrent practice in historical research
since the 1980s. At the Centre for Computing
in the Humanities there are several projects devoted to
prosopography. Both the Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon
England (PASE) and the Prosopography of the Byzantine
World (PBW) have now become leading resources
in the academic world and exemplars in this practice.
Having emerged from the specific needs and constraints
required by historians, the databases have now evolved
in order to allow new avenues of enquiry that go beyond
the initial aims of the researchers. Both projects have become
became laboratories for the relational modelling of
historical sources. This led to the development to what
Bradley and Short called a ‘highly structured approach
to historical data’, or ‘new-style prosopography’ (Bradley
and Short 2005).
One of the major challenges of this project was to test,
adapt and revise the relational model used in PASE and
in PBW.
A prosopographical database is essentially comprised
of three elements: sources containing ‘factoids’ about
persons. These elements should provide a guide to the
modelling stage. The poster will focus on specific issues:
1. How to incorporate different types of sources? The
research will include published sources, original
(manuscript) archival material and edited manuscripts.
The sources are of a wide range, mainly
literary and administrative. This diversity challenges,
for instance, notions of authorship. Who is
the author of a royal letter: the king, the person who
drafted the letter, or all the officials who authorized
and signed the document?
2. How to deal with ‘factoids’ involving several actors/
agents? In the relational databases developed at
King’s College London, a factoid is an ‘assertion by
a source about one or more persons’ (Bradley and
Short 2001). The database revises the solution adopted
in PASE and PBW, where an ‘event’, although
being a ‘factoid’, was effectively separated from the
‘factoid’ table. The model presented here reconfigures
these tables and adopts a different approach.
The solution was to introduce an intermediary table
called ‘PersonInFactoid’, which combines ‘factoids’
and persons, associated with an authority table that
specifies the role played by each person in a given
‘factoid’.
3. How to organize the different types of ‘factoids’?
This is done by the use of authority lists that in fact
can ‘manage’ the ‘factoids’. The database retains the
authority tables used in PASE while simplifying and
at the same time tightening their structure.
4. Finally, can it be possible to design a database that
allows users to search for things not envisaged when
doing the initial research? In fact, either the developer
or the future users might want to access further
data. Although the diverse types of factoids reflect
the specific research questions of the project they
do not compromise the assertions conveyed by the
sources – these are kept in the factoid table. The process of analysis and database design produced
a ‘lighter’ and modified version of the PASE database
structure. The poster will show the different tables created
and their relationships, highlighting the problems
and constraints of modelling the sources to the digital
model. The input process will be done using a sourcedriven
approach, that is, the information in the database
will be information found in the corpora of sources used.
References
Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England (PASE): http://
www.pase.ac.uk (accessed 14 November 2008).
Prosopography of the Byzantine World (PBW): http://
www.pbw.kcl.ac.uk (accessed 14 November 2008).
Bradley, J. and Short H. (2001). Using Format Structures
to create complex relationships: the prosopography
of the Byzantine Empire – a case study, http://www. cch.
kcl.ac.uk/legacy/staff/jdb/papers/pbe-leeds/body.html,
accessed 14 November 2008.
Bradley, J. and Short H. (2005). Texts into Databases:
The Evolving Field of New-style Prosopography, Literary
and Linguist Computing 20: 3-24.