5. Prosopography - SunoikisisDC/SunoikisisDC-2023-2024 GitHub Wiki

Digital prosopography

SunoikisisDC Digital Classics and Byzantine Studies: Session 5

Date: Monday May 6, 2024. 16:00-17:30 BST = 17:00-18:30 CEST.

Convenors: James Baillie (Universität Wien), Ekaterini Mitsiou (Universität Wien)

Youtube link: youtu.be/uoeFxavK3q8

Slides: Combined slides (PDF)

Outline

This session gives an overview of prosopography, the study of collections of past persons in structured data formats. In it, we cover the basics of the history, theory, and practice of prosopographical research. This includes looking in particular at the development and aims of this form of research, and at current available projects on various historical contexts. We also look at the thought processes and data structures needed to build appropriate models of historical entities, including both prosopography as a model of the historical past and prosopography as a way of viewing person data through texts.

Required readings

Further readings

Resources

Prosopographical Systems

Teaching Material

Projects

Exercise

From a “Regest” to OPEN ATLAS

  • Our sample: Regest no. 1676
  • Date: June 1207
  • [Ὁρισμός]; διορίζεται (text): to the praktor (ἐνεργῶν) of the thema Thrakesion: Basil Blatteros, former bestiarites under the αὐτάδελφος of the emperor, Alexios Komnenos, has informed the emperor that his relatives Michael, John and Nicholas Gunaropoulos once owned land in the district of Demosion but that it was forcibly seized from them by the village Kyparissiou, which belongs to the metropolis of Smyrna. The official is ordered to conduct an investigation in order that the land be restituted to the three brothers if they can proof the veracity of their claim and that the respective fraction of the tithe (μορτή) for the time they had used it be handed over by the inhabitants of Kyparissiou.
  • A (from Lemb.-Diplom. ff. 181v-182r): MM IV, 217/18, cf. Gounarides, Edition, Nr. 137
  • Chron.: Dö., Chron. und Prosop. 315, A. 1. Gounarides, Edition, Nr. 137 (June 1207) and comments

Scoping Exercise

This is a short guided exercise in writing the scope for a prosopography project, which aims to cover most of the key questions that you might need to answer when doing so. Try to tackle the following set of questions:

  1. The project’s aims - what sort of questions do you want to ask?
    • This can impact on all the rest of these questions
    • If you want to ask questions about how we should think about the historical situation itself, you may be more likely to want a model: if your questions are more related to the source material and its presentation of historical figures, an index might be more appropriate.
  2. Whether the project seeks to index or model its data
    • Is it providing a dataset of where people are mentioned in the sources, regardless of potential conflicts (an index), or is it trying to produce a single unified picture of what might have been the case based on your reading of the sources (a model)?
  3. The source corpus that will be used.
  4. What the geographical or chronological scope of the project is and whether the project is fundamentally bounded by the geography/chronology or the source corpus.
    • This can link back to your questions: is what a source outside your initial corpus says likely to impact on the questions you want to ask?
    • There may in practice need to be a mixture of both of these.
  5. Whether “connective” persons outside the dataset can be included, such as:
    • Recipients of letters outside the area?
    • Family members of people in the database who don’t themselves fit core criteria?
  6. Whether a person needs to be ‘real’ to be included
    • Figures from outside your period may be interesting for literary reasons: if a figure in your dataset is analogised to Alexander, Caesar, or Constantine, should they be in your prosopography? Usually not, but for more source and literary approaches this may be different.
    • What about implied persons? Take “The emperor was stabbed” - does this give you an implied assassin? Often a useful rule of thumb is “is there enough information here to potentially identify this person again if they appear elsewhere”?
  7. What data model should be used
    • Consider the index/model problem again here: to take two common model types, factoid models are built for indexing, person-prosopon models for modelling.

Try writing this a second time with a very different set of questions and see how different your answers are to the rest of the scoping elements!