Prosopography and Computer Ontologies: The ‘Factoid’ Model and CIDOC-CRM

Presented at “Representing Knowledge in the Digital Humanities”, University of Kansas, September 24, 2011. Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities: http://idrh.ku.edu Michele Pasin is a Research Associate with Kings College, London.Abstract: Structured Prosopography provides a formal model for representing prosopography: a branch of historical research that traditionally has focused on the identification of people that appear in historical sources. Pre-digital print prosopographies, such as Martindale 1992, presented its materials as narrative articles about the individuals it contains. Since the 1990s, KCL’s Department of Digital Humanities (formerly known as Center for Computing in the Humanities) has been involved in the development of structured prosopographical databases, and has had direct involvement in Prosopographies of the Byzantine World (PBE and PBW), Anglo-Saxon England (PASE), Medieval Scotland (PoMS) and now more generally northern Britain (“Breaking of Britain”: BoB), and is currently in discussions about others. DDH has been involved in the development of a general “factoid-oriented” model of structure that although downplaying or eliminating narratives about people, has to a large extent served the needs of these various projects quite well.Structured Prosopography provides a formal model for representing prosopography: a branch of historical research that traditionally has focused on the identification of people that appear in historical sources. Pre-digital print prosopographies, such as Martindale 1992, presented its materials as narrative articles about the individuals it contains. Since the 1990s, KCL’s Department of Digital Humanities (formerly known as Center for Computing in the Humanities) has been involved in the development of structured prosopographical databases, and has had direct involvement in Prosopographies of the Byzantine World (PBE and PBW), Anglo-Saxon England (PASE), Medieval Scotland (PoMS) and now more generally northern Britain (“Breaking of Britain”: BoB), and is currently in discussions about others. DDH has been involved in the development of a general “factoid-oriented” model of structure that although downplaying or eliminating narratives about people, has to a large extent served the needs of these various projects quite well