Digital Prosopography of the Roman Republic (DPRR)

Tuesday, May 7, 2024

Digital Prosopography of the Roman Republic (DPRR)

The Digital Prosopography of the Roman Republic (DPRR) is the result of a three-year, AHRC-funded project based at the Department of Classics and the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London. The primary objective of the project is to facilitate prosopographical research into the elite of the Roman Republic, its structure, scale and changes in composition over time. To that end a comprehensive, searchable database of all known members of the upper strata Roman society has been established, which brings together information about individual careers, office holdings, personal status, life dates and family relationships. The aim has not been to create an entire new prosopography of the Roman Republic from scratch but instead to build on the work of previous scholars and translate their achievements into a digital, online format that makes the extensive, and in many respects unwieldy, material more easily available to academics as well as to the general public. In doing so the hope is also to enable new types of prosopographical research to be conducted, using statistical and quantitative methods. The project incorporates directly into its database the information on office holders presented in Broughton’s Magistrates of the Roman Republic, which forms the backbone of the database, Rüpke’s inventory of Roman priests in the Fasti Sacerdotum, the collection of information about family relations found in Zmeskal’s Adfinitas, and Pina Polo’s work on repulsae, defeated candidates.
From a Digital Humanities perspective, DPRR innovativeness lies in its explicit approach to Linked Open Data, in that all the data created by the DPRR project team is also expressed explicitly in the standard Semantic Web format for Linked Open Data, RDF. You can read more about the technical development of DPRR on this website and on the RDF documentation page if interested.