Does digital humanities hold any promise for the writing of individual biographies, or is one life too small to crunch with big data?
Charles J. Shields
DH & Biography
(3 posts) (3 voices)-
You may be interested in reading about Alison Booth's projects at the Scholars' Lab and Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at UVa. Professor Booth is the recent receipient of an ACLS digital innovation fellowship for her work on prosopography and the mapping of narrative structures in collective biographies of women. She has been developing a markup schema called BESS (Biographical Elements and Structure Schema) for identifying and analyzing common structures in individual biographies.
Posted 2 years ago Permalink -
Ethan Gruber
MemberProsopographies are the next big thing in Classical Studies, and there's a tremendous amount of work being done in the library and archival communities with aligning name authority systems to enable large-scale aggregation and access to LAM content. EAC-CPF is an emerging standard for the description of people, families, and corporate bodies, but TEI has also been used for prosopographies ( http://wiki.tei-c.org/index.php/Prosopography ), and certainly TEI could serve as a container for more detailed individual biographies. As for EAC-CPF, the highest-profile project is IATH's Social Networks and Archival Context Project ( http://socialarchive.iath.virginia.edu/ ). It is still in the prototype phase, but it contains several million entity records derived from name authority files and archival finding aids contributed by dozens of organizations (OCLC, Library of Congress, BnF, Getty, etc.). SNAC will eventually evolve into an international consortium maintaining millions of entities, each expressed as a URI in semantic web terms. Holders of content will be able to link their records to SNAC identifiers. The specific workflow is a bit fuzzy at the moment, but the end goal is to allow researchers of, say, Thomas Jefferson, to view the EAC-CPF record of Jefferson, and archival materials held at multiple institutions will be made available through one interface.
A similar project is evolving in the Classical Studies community: Standards for Networking Ancient Prosopographies (SNAP, http://snapdrgn.net/ ). The idea here is to align various prosopographies in linked open data methodologies to enable the aggregation of content based on people as well as experiment with social network graphs. A researcher of Augustus would be able to read biographical information as well as gain access to epigraphy mentioning him, coins and statues depicting him, or architectural monuments that he commissioned. The model for this project is Pelagios ( http://pelagios-project.blogspot.com/ ), which has similarly aggregated content based on ancient geographical places defined by Pleiades ( http://pleiades.stoa.org/ ). I am planning on participating in this initiative in several capacities. We are beginning to build a prosopography of the Roman Empire, formed in EAC-CPF initially generated from open data and supplemented by biographical context added through an EAC-CPF editor that I have been developing for about 18 months called xEAC ( https://github.com/ewg118/xEAC ).
So, back to your point about individual biographies. EAC-CPF is more data-oriented than document-oriented, so TEI is a more capable vessel for individual biographies. There's an awful lot you can do in TEI: implement machine readable dates, link places mentioned in texts to gazetteers on the web (like Geonames.org), link related or mentioned people to resources defined on SNAC. So you could build your biography from the ground up to become part of the larger linked open data cloud while simultaneously being able to harness existing web services to gather and display content related to people and places that you've tagged in your TEI. Suppose you've written a biography of Thomas Jefferson. You've linked your record to the SNAC-defined URI for Jefferson. SNAC would eventually be able to harvest some RDF or EAC-CPF about your person so that when a researcher comes to the SNAC portal for Jefferson, he or she will be able to follow links back to your biography, archival materials held at the University of Virginia, or books by or about him that have been catalogued in Worldcat.
Posted 2 years ago Permalink
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