Texts into Databases: The Evolving Field of New-Style Prosopography

Texts into Databases: The Evolving Field of New-Style
Prosopography

John
Bradley

King's College London
john.bradley@kcl.ac.uk

Harold
Short

King's College London
harold.short@kcl.ac.uk

2003

University of Georgia

Athens, Georgia

ACH/ALLC 2003

editor

Eric
Rochester

William
A.
Kretzschmar, Jr.

encoder

Sara
A.
Schmidt

The Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King’s College London is involved
in three broadly Prosopographical projects: the Prosopography
of the Byzantine Empire (PBE) (recently renamed Prosopography of the Byzantine World—PBW), the Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England (PASE), and the Clergy of the Church of England Database (CCE). (All are
funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Board.)
The goals of these three projects at King’s are ambitious. PBE’s goal is “to
record in a computerised relational database all surviving information about
every individual mentioned in Byzantine sources during the period from 641 to
1261, and every individual mentioned in non-Byzantine sources during the same
period who is ‘relevant’ (on a generous interpretation) to Byzantine affairs.”
(from website, see references). PASE’s aim is “to provide a comprehensive
biographical register of recorded inhabitants of Anglo-Saxon England (c.
450-1066).” (from website). CCE intends to create a “database of clergymen of
the Church of England between 1540 and 1835.” (from website).
The sources of information for all three projects are surviving manuscript
records of many kinds. The central computing tool that all three projects employ
is the relational database. Obviously, there is a significant issue involved in
taking the textual source material, often presented discursively, and presenting
it in the structured form that a database requires. Central, then, to the design
of the database, and to the continuing process of putting data into it, is
ensuring that the scholarly interpretation essential to this transformation is
properly accommodated.
In traditional Prosopography (see, for example, the well-known Prosopography of the Late Roman Empire, or the more recent Prosopographie der mittelbyzantinischen Zeit—PmbZ(Lille et
al 1998-2002)), the central organising principle is the person. The information
about the person is formed into an article by the scholar, and the articles
themselves are organised by the person’s name. There is often some degree of
more structured information attached (in PmbZ, for example, there is, among
other lists, a formal list of sources in which information about the person
could be gleaned). However, the primary source of information for the user is
the article. The article is presented as a narrative in which we find a complex
blending of quotation from sources and scholarly interpretation. Some of the
assertions are made without further justification, in some cases an argument is
provided to support why an assertion has been made, in some cases an issue is
left unresolved and only alternatives are outlined. The scholar's task is to
take the evidence provided by the sources s/he has read and to represent in the
article the shades of certainty about any of them.
All three of our Prosopographical projects take a radically different
approach.Those familiar with the CD publication of PBE I may
have observed that the approach taken there was actually a transitional
one—somewhere between the article-oriented and factoid-oriented approach
described here. The current phase of PBE work has fully taken on the
approach described below The final publication will not be a set of
volumes containing articles, but an online database. Furthermore, all three
projects agree that there will be none or very few articles about persons in
their database, and they will be written after the
data collection process is complete, rather than being central to it. Instead,
the evidence data will be recorded as a series of factoids—assertions made by the project team that a source “S” at
location “L” states something (”F”) about person “P”. Factoid was first applied to this kind of information by Dion Smythe
and Gorden Gallacher, and is not a statement of fact about a person; it is an
assertion that a source says something about him/her. In Figure 1 you can see
some sample output from the PBE database, showing factoids derived from the
source Skylitzes Continuatus; for Emperor Alexios I
Komnenos (identified in the DB as Alexios 001) in 1078. As the illustration
suggests, there are several different kinds of factoids provided. In PBE,
factoid data is collected for things such as activities or events in which the
person took part; physical, spiritual or physiological descriptions applied to
them; dignities or offices they held; ethnic group to which they belonged;
kinship relationships with other people; locations with which they were
associated; occupations they took up; possessions they owned; and religion they
professed.

Figure 1: A Factoid List for Alexios I Komnenos (PBE)

Factoids are modeled as entities in the prosopographical database, and each
factoid type contains both an explicit and implicit structure. The explicit
structure can be relatively complex. Figure 2 shows the data capture screen
displaying one of PASE's event factoids—the event being the tonsoring of Guthlac
by Aelfthryth (as recorded in the Vita Sancti
Guthlaci). Not only is there a description field that contains
information about the act itself (here only the beginning of the full text
recorded in the field is visible), but the event is:
categorized in the Term field,
attached to a place (the place described using the word found in the
original text, the type of place it is and its modern day location),
and
linked to the two people involved, one identified as the recipient and
the other as the agent.

Furthermore,
the textual source for the event, and location in the text where the
act is recorded is entered in the database, and
there is space for recording a scholarly date recording when the event
is thought to have occurred, and space to record whatever dating
information is given in the source (only partially visible in this
figure).

Finally, there is a place in the “Notes” and “Problems” field where the
researcher can record in free text some commentary on the factoid that s/he
considers important but does not fit the structured fields associated with the
factoid itself.

Figure 2: An Event Factoid in PASE

There are, in addition, elements of implicit structure that must be recorded in
the textual elements—a reference to another person in the database in the
description of an event would be an example of this. Textual fields in our
projects are, therefore, often structured as mini-XML documents, with XML being
used to handle the structure that they contain and making it available for
further machine handling.
A relational database is most useful when the data it contains is highly
structured. The capability of the relational model is often underestimated in
scholarly circles, and both Greenstein (Greenstein 1994), and Townsend et al (in
the AHDS Guides to Good Practice: Digitising History)
begin their discussion of databases by acknowledging that a single table in the
relational database as often too limited for large scale historical use (it is
described as the “matrix straitjacket” in Townsend). Greenstein, however,
recognises that the relational aspect of the
relational model—which allows material from more than one table to be linked
into a single logical entity —allows for richer collections of information to be
formed. Once an entry (say, for the Person) in a table is changed from being a
text string containing the person’s name to a link to a row in another “person
information” table it is possible to record a great deal of richer information
about that person. Thus, PBE, PASE and CCE databases contain not only structured
data in the form of factoids, but they also contain complex structures spread
over more than one table each that represent other important “objects” in the
database related to the factoids such as persons, geographic locations and
possessions.
The challenges associated with our Prosopographical databases are many. First,
there is a constant struggle to be sure that, for each field one enters, one is
clear about to what extent the field represents simply what is in the source,
and to what extent it is actually represents a scholarly interpretation of that
source. Even the “original source” fields holds text out of context, making it a
matter of scholarly decision about exactly what fragment should be
included.Linking of our databases to full-text representations
of the source texts have been considered by all projects. In all three
projects, however, this has been rejected for various reasons. There was no
funding to take on the preparation of a fresh electronic edition, and, in
general, no scholarly reputable electronic editions of the texts were
available elsewhere. PASE might yet explore some options in this area,
however, for recording data from charters.
Furthermore, for all three projects data is collected on a source-by-source basis
by more than one researcher. The issue of consistency between researchers is
constantly on our minds. Consistency issues are dealt with during the editorial
phase of the project, where editors will use tools to assert, for example, that
a person A in one source is the same person as person B in another. We expect to
have more to say about these issues during our presentation at the
conference.
An article in a traditional prosopography provides a well organised bundle of
information to its user in the form of a narrative. What happens when the
prosopography contains large collections of factoids instead? As figure I
suggests, the factoid model used in these projects provides a way that the
machine can generate “micro-narratives”—to use the term presented in (Ramsay
2002). These narratives will be richly linked to other data in the system, and
different micro-narratives will be generated when one enters from different
starting points (say, from a location, rather than from a person), or by
traversing links that connect materials in each factoid to the broader database
contents. Clearly, a web access mechanism for these databases will need to be
significantly more complex than a simple search form which results in a list of
selected items. We believe that the best interface to this will provide the
blending of a searching and browsing paradigm that is now characteristic of
large websites on the WWW. All three projects are now reaching the stages where
some detailed exploration of these presentation and selection issues can begin.
We will describe some of these issues in more detail during the conference
presentation.
In moving from article-based to factoid-based prosopography, all three of our
projects are participating in the development of a radically new approach to the
field. The role of the scholar has clearly altered in our projects. In addition
to being ultimately responsible for the projects’ “content”, all project members
must work together to ensure that new methodologies are developed which ensure
both quality and consistency of information across the large number of
individual factoids. The role of the scholarly end-user may also have to change,
and here too the project has to work to ensure that the experience of the
end-user searching through these factoids is positive and useful. In the end, we
are finding new ways that technology can serve these essential scholarly
goals.

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