Wednesday, August 28, 2019

Factoids: A site that introduces Factoid Prosopography

Factoids: A site that introduces Factoid Prosopography
Factoid Prosopography is an approach to representing prosopographical research that centres on the idea of the “factoid”.  It is an approach that had its beginnings in the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King’s College London (now Department of Digital Humanities) in the mid 1990s, but which has continued to be refined and modified there since then through a number of historically independent prosopographies.  Furthermore, factoid (or at least factoid-like) thinking has been taken up in varying degrees by other individuals and projects.
If judged by the number of digital historians who seem interested in it, the idea of factoids in prosopography has proven to be a useful one for thinking about data-oriented, highly structured, prosopography.  However, it does seem that beyond a general sense of what a factoid might be there has been little agreement outside of CCH/DDH about what a prosopography in the factoid style should actually be like.  This site is meant to promote some thinking about this issue from the pragmatic perspective that has developed by one of the people at CCH/DDH who has worked on factoid prosopographies for many years – John Bradley (the author of this site). It does this by
  1. presenting a brief document that describes what the author thinks factoid prosopography is all about. (see here),
  2. providing links to the various projects that CCH/DDH and John Bradley have been involved in that describe themselves as factoid prosopographies (see here), and
  3. providing a first attempt at a formal ontology that is meant to capture some of the important formalisms that have underpinned the CCH/DDH prosopographies (see here).
 

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